


Third Rule of Fight Club

by aperfectsong



Category: Veronica Mars (TV), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: Case Gone Wrong, F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-27
Packaged: 2018-09-17 13:36:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 34,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9327101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aperfectsong/pseuds/aperfectsong
Summary: After a case goes wrong, Logan finds Veronica at the beach.AU after Return of the Kane, Logan POV.





	1. Chapter 1

Logan is sitting in his car, waiting for Dick to answer his goddamn phone so he has somewhere to go that isn’t home, an excuse to drink until he can’t drive.

He even contemplates calling Duncan. His fingers hover over speed dial 3 when he sees Veronica Mars run down the street, a shadow in black, her bag colliding with her knees at every step.

He opens his mouth instinctually to shout something at her though his open car window. “Running from loan sharks?” he thinks, but stops when he sees that there is blood dripping from a gash in her forehead. It has trickled down her face in a curved sort of trail, down the ridge of her eyebrow, along the crease of her eyelid, over the bump of her cheekbone. There is a reddish smear across her forehead, too, that must have been made by the back of her hand or maybe the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

He notices all this as though he were watching a film: an action scene turned silent, slow motion, serious, and he can’t help but think of Lilly, of the crime scene footage he didn’t want to see but couldn’t turn away from. The bloody gash to the temple and her dead staring eyes.

He has often wondered if Lilly had enough time dying to think of him, to realize he loved her in spite of everything, or if it all happened too fast: one minute she was Lilly, laying on a lounge chair, and the next she was just dead, nothing else. 

He watches her as she stops running, looks behind her, and then turns down the next street. He is still thinking of Lilly when he turns over the engine and drives in the direction she ran. She is heading toward the water, which he thinks is a stupid idea if she were running from someone, no where to hide except under the dark ocean waves. He thought Veronica was smarter than that. This time of night on a Friday, the beach is dark, probably nearly empty in this weather, somewhere between mist and fog, except for the stoners who hang out under the pier. If he were running from someone, he would duck into somewhere public, like a convenience store, somewhere with cameras.

He catches up to her in the parking spaces next to Dog Beach and honks his horn. The sound cuts through the night and startles her. She is a silhouette at first in the light of a streetlamp, standing in the uneven sand in her heavy boots, kind of hunched over, as though she is cornered and wild, ready to strike. She gives an almost imperceptible shudder, but turns around and he can see she is holding a taser pointed in his direction, a tiny spark dancing at the end of it like some kind of magic wand. So, the rumors are true. Little Veronica Mars is into some serious shit.

"On your way back from the fight club?” he asks.

She lowers the taser but keeps it at her side, not loosening her grip on it or even taking her finger off of the trigger. She stares at Logan as he watches the little spark and wonders if tasers are even legal.

“First rule of fight club,” Veronica says informatively.

He can tell her attention isn’t really on him. She is looking behind him at the road, eyes like prey scanning for the slightest disturbance, the slightest movement. She does not even blink. His only thought is this: what the fuck would Lilly think if she could see Veronica now?

Her level of intensity catches and he looks in his rear view and side mirrors, but he doesn’t see anyone, certainly not a violent sociopath in the shadows carrying a blunt object, running in their direction.

“What happened?” he asks as he leans out his car window.

They’ve had a tentative truce since she gave him those tapes for Lilly’s memorial, and he tells himself this is another reason he followed her. Damsel in distress and that shit, only she looks more like some kind of pissed off super villain one step away from destroying the world. She wipes at the blood on her forehead and winces as she grazes the source of if.

“Second rule of fight club,” she deadpans.

He can get that he doesn’t exactly have a good track record, with her, with sensitive information. He gets that, but there was a look they shared at the memorial, a kind of melting away of some of the resentment, like a candle shedding wax. He thought it wasn’t just one-sided. And she obviously needs help. And he has time to kill anyway. Veronica turns again to look at the road and then kind of sways in place. She reaches a hand out and steadies herself on the hood of his car.

“Hey, watch the paint job,” he jokes.

But she doesn’t move off his car or say anything. Instead, she turns around to face the water and sort of hunches over against the front bumper of his car. In the light from his dash, he can see when she turns that her hair, too, is flecked with blood. Behind her, the dark water looks like sky, and the black sky looks as though it could go on forever. If someone is really after her, they would find her on the beach in a second, a single black shape darker than the sand.

“Veronica?” he says, but she doesn’t answer. “Hey, Veronica?” he calls again, a little louder.

He gets out of the car then, his shoes sinking into the sand with each step, sand slipping over the edges and into his sole. He jogs around to the front of the car, where Veronica is now sitting on his bumper with her neck bent so that her head is resting between her knees.

“What the fuck,” he says.

He can hear her breathing slow and artificial, the way people breathe when they forget its supposed to be an unconscious process, counting the seconds to inhale and exhale, the conscious part of the brain overthinking a process it is supposed to do automatically. She groans, too, and presses both hands over her wound.

“Do you like, need to go to the hospital or something?” he asks. The blood unsettles him, as though with the sight of it his body reenacts some evolutionary response; his heart thuds in his chest and he is frozen in front of her.

"No," she says shakily and he doesn’t believe her at all. "I'm fine. You can just go.”

Her suggestion that he leave spurs him into action.

He moves next to her and he can see that her head is still bleeding, dripping from between her fingers onto the ground where it forms a dark spot on the sand. He just had his car cleaned out last week and the only thing he can think of to use is a stack of Dairy Queen napkins in the glove compartment. He opens the car door again and gets them out of the paper bag. He should probably have a first aid kit, but Duncan is the one who has one in his car for surfing emergencies, not that they ever needed it.

“Here,” he says and holds the napkins out to her.

“What?” she says, still not looking up. Her voice sounds far away, but it could just be that she’s still facing the ground and he can’t hear her that well over the waves breaking just off the shore, and not that she’s fading or dying. She doesn’t look up or take the napkins from him. It is almost like she forgot they were just talking a few minutes ago.

“You’re bleeding,” he explains.

“I hadn’t noticed,” she says sarcastically, and he can see that her sleeve is full of it, though in the night, it just looks wet, like she might have just reached for a seashell in the shallows, cool ocean water up to her elbow. It makes him wonder how far she ran before he saw her.

“Smart,” he says. He crouches down to get near her line of sight, waving the napkins. She looks up and her eyes are unfocused, like she doesn’t even see him, but only the space around him. She reaches out slowly for the napkins and holds them to her head.

“Thanks,” she says and puts her head back between her knees, and it seems to Logan like a kind of Yoga pose. She sits that way breathing for a few minutes. Each inhalation and exhalation sounds controlled. Logan watches her and wonders if he should call 911.

Suddenly, she looks up wildly, like a caged animal. “Wait, did you see him? Is there? Is he?” She speaks disjointedly, as if the rest of her words escape her ability to form them. She tries to stand and turn to look past the car, but misjudges something about the movement, enough to make her lose her balance, her hands coming down hard onto the sand with the stack of bloody napkins. A few of them escape her hold and fly, strangely bird like, to the water. Logan reaches out for her, but by that time, she is already down on her knees. The smell outside is of wet sand and blood. He watches as she pulls herself to her knees and sits back on her heavy boots.

“Damnit,” she says. She lets go of the rest of the stack of now sandy napkins and they blow a few feet away, pausing at a sandcastle, before going off in all directions with the wind. There’s no use in catching them now, so Logan just watches until the last one becomes yet more litter in the ocean.

“No one’s there,” he says, double checking the road, sensing her anxiety. He stands next to her, not sure if he should help her up, but thinking maybe she’s better off on the ground if she’s that dizzy.

“Okay,” she says, half in an undertone. “Okay,” she says again and moves to a sitting position in the sand, pushing sand out of the way with her legs, as though she were making a nest. She presses the bloody sleeve against her head like a good girl scout. She sits impossibly, uncomfortably still. Minutes pass. It occurs to him that maybe she is waiting for him to leave or maybe for him to say something.

Even though they aren’t quite friends anymore, he can’t just leave her here. Can he? Get back into his clean car and drive back home as though he never saw her?

Truth is, he’s been rethinking a lot of this past year, especially when it comes to Veronica. Seeing her on those tapes from last year’s homecoming changed something for him, the striking difference between who she used to be and the way she is now, a curiosity bubbling inside of him to understand it. They had all changed with Lilly’s death – Duncan, Logan, even the atmosphere of the school had changed. But, the Veronica on the tape was almost unrecognizable to him; he was so used to the vindictive, defensive, malicious version of her he had made into an enemy, he had almost forgotten she wasn’t always that way. For Lilly, this new Veronica would have been a complete stranger. He has to understand. He has to know that it wasn’t all his fault. It couldn’t have been just because of him, but because of everything that happened all at once. It couldn’t be just his fault.

After what seems like a long time, she sits upright and looks at him. He can see her eyes though most of her face is shadowed.

“So, do you do this often?” Logan asks, still standing over her.

She stares at him, as if organizing the words in her head.

“Just on special occasions.”

“What happened?” he asks again. He watches Veronica stare at the waves for a minute or so, breathing in and out. He wonders vaguely if it was some kind of car accident, but that wouldn’t explain her running from it, or the fear he recognized on her as though it were his own. He wonders too who she could be running from, what kind of person would hurt a girl like that, if they are both in danger standing out in the open. He looks to the road but sees no one.

“Occupational hazard,” she finally answers.

“I hear stunts doubles don’t get paid well,” he says and digs a hole in the sand with the toe of his shoe.

"I'm working for my dad,” she explains.

He did hear something about that, about Veronica Mars’ descent into the lower middle class, working as a receptionist for her dad at his private investigator business. He hadn’t been sure it if was actually true, or just another of the many rumors spread about her, like the one that she had to shoplift just to eat, or the one that she once gave Butters a blow job in the locker room for $50 and a ride home.

“Did you pick up the phone too hard?”

She lets loose a hollow laugh. “Someone didn’t want their picture taken.” She opens her bag and fishes out a piece of a camera, clearly broken. She ejects a small SD card and zips it into a smaller pouch. She lists to one side and Logan crouches down to steady her. She hits his arm away, but barely. Up close, he can see that her gash is accompanied by a darkening bruise that has already started to swell.

“Someone hit you?” Logan asks, piecing her abbreviated story together. He leans out of the way of the light to get a better look. It’s still bleeding, sending out a new wet trail down the side of her face. She wipes her hand off on her jeans and scratches at it, spreading more of the blood into her hair.

She slowly begins to lay down on her side, but Logan intercepts her, reaching his arms under her and pulling her back into a sitting position. Though she doesn’t seem to have the energy for it, she struggles until she jerks herself free from his grasp.

“Don’t touch me,” she says. He lets her go and she falls to the other side.

“Veronica, don’t fucking lay down. You’re going to get it all full of sand.”

“Just for a second,” she says. “There are too many waves.”

“At least lay the other way,” Logan says, watching as she lowers herself, this time, onto her other side. “I think you have a concussion.” He looks again at the road, but it is still empty. A streetlight flickers.

He’s had a concussion before. It made for one of his first trips to the hospital as a kid. He didn’t need stitches or anything though, but he had a big bump on the back of his head from the side of a heavy wooden table he was pushed into. It was kind of an accident. He can still remember his father carrying him into the car, apologizing over and over again when he regained consciousness, as though it really were an accident, as though he really were sorry. He lay on his father’s lap on the way to the hospital, his father brushing the hair out of his eyes and squeezing his hands, trying to keep him awake. The worst part is he still remembers being happy for the attention, for the fear for him in his father’s eyes he mistook for love.

“It’s fine,” Veronica says in a dreamy kind of voice. This isn’t his first clue that something is wrong, but it is the one he takes seriously. He is about to suggest the hospital again when his phone rings, a muffled trill from inside the pocket of his cargo shorts.

It’s Dick, twenty minutes late. “Got the booze and the ladies,” he says as a greeting. “My pool house or yours?”

“I’ve got something going on,” Logan says. “Go ahead without me.”

“Ooh, another woman,” Dick says. “So we’ll count you out then.” Logan lets him misinterpret because it will be easier than to say he’s sitting at Dog Beach with a concussed Veronica Mars.

“Yeah man. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He ends the call and pockets the phone.

“You can go,” Veronica says though her voice sounds small or maybe half-asleep.

“Yeah, right,” he says. When he turns back to look at her, she is resting her head on a cement pylon and she has her eyes closed. Logan runs a hand through his hair and watches the black water, searching for the buoys he knows are there but can’t see in the dark.

“Why are you even here?” she asks, her voice full of air.

He had to get out of the house for the night, because despite the punishment for the bum fights last week, his father does not forgive easily. He put the idea in Dick’s head to have a party or find one so Logan would have an excuse to stay the night somewhere else, sleep into the day, get out of his father’s line of sight until he couldn’t anymore.

Logan crouches next to her and then sits down on the pylon. He can’t help but think of how dirty the sand probably is with all those dogs here everyday. Veronica’s hair is covered in it.

“I don’t know if you grasp the gravity of the situation in your concussed state, but I’ll lay it out for you. You have a head wound that is still bleeding and you want me to leave you alone on an abandoned beach holding blackmail against someone who already hurt you for it. Where’s your car anyway?” He looks around for it, but the lot is empty.

“The Camelot parking lot.” She sighs and wipes at her face again. She hisses when her hand comes into contact with the bruise and withdraws it immediately.

“You ran all the way from The Camelot?”

“I know, right. I should join cross country.” She kind of laughs in a sleepy kind of way. “It was all adrenaline.” Slowly, she moves herself into a sitting position. She turns again to look at the road before looking looking back out at the water. A black wave breaks close to shore, the foam glinting white in the moonlight.

“You thought some guy would chase you all the way out here?” He knows it has to be a guy to leave a bruise like that. He turns to look at the road again and then at the PCH with its occasional set of yellow headlights. It has to be a mile, at least.

“Well, he conceivably had a car at the motel.” In that moment, she seems to notice the amount of blood on her black hoodie sleeve and tentatively touches her hair, behind where the wound is. Her hand comes away red. Logan watches as she stares at it for a few seconds and then wipes it on her pants. Still, it leaves a red stain on her palm. “I kind of thought some of it was sweat,” she says and leans back. “Is it still bleeding?”

“Yes, for the sixth time, it’s still bleeding. Let me take you to the hospital,” Logan says. He stands up and holds a hand out to her. She doesn’t take it.

“I don’t want to go to the hospital. I just need to clean it, I think.”

“I bet when your dad sees you, he’ll take you straight to the hospital.”

She doesn't answer, but starts separating the bloody clumps of her hair with her fingers. She winces when detangling them pulls at her scalp. Her breaths come out irregular, but she isn’t crying. “He’s in Mesa,” she says after a while.

“You should call him then, so he can tell you to go to the hospital,” Logan says.

“I’m not going to the hospital for a bump on my head.”

“Why are you being so stubborn about this? You probably need stitches.”

“Because I’m not going to the hospital. Our insurance doesn’t cover ER visits, not that it’s any of your business.”

Logan doesn’t say anything for a while. He just can’t imagine a trip to the hospital for stitches costing that much. He wonders again at the shoplifting rumors.

He is struck again by how different things are now than they were just over a year ago, how this Veronica is some new variant of the one he used to know, and it isn’t just the short hair and the black nail polish or the new zip code. She’s hard edges and shadow, danger and disguise. He isn’t going to leave her here alone, but he has the sense that even if he did, she’d be okay somehow. It scares him, deep down, how much she changed after Lilly died, and he can’t get out of his mind the idea that it is somehow his fault—action and reaction.

“I can take you home,” he says inevitably. She lets his words evaporate on the air, as though waiting for any memory of them to be erased before she answers. She looks at her bloody hand again. He hopes that she will look at herself in the mirror and decide she needs to go to the emergency room after all.

“Okay,” she acquiesces.

He holds a hand out and this time, she does take it. She moves unsteadily, like she has had too much to drink, but she lets him hold her up until she can reach the car. She presses her free hand against it to support herself as he walks her around it to the passenger side. He wonders if detailing can get out blood stains and red fingerprints and he figures as long as he’s paying, someone will be able to take care of it.

“Do you have a towel for the seat?” she asks.

She leans against the passenger door while he walks around back to check. He does. It is sandy, but dry, and he lays it over the back of the seat. On the way up, she loses her footing and hits her shin against the frame of Logan’s car. She winces through her teeth. He catches her almost around the waist and lifts her up before she can stop him. She’s small and light, despite the heavy boots and the attitude.

In his car, they sit in silence and Veronica inspects her head in the mirror, moving wet hair out of her face and trying not to touch anything with her bloody fingers, though she already left fingerprints on the seatbelt and the yellow paint. She clasps one hand over her head, using her sleeves to apply pressure, though the bleeding has slowed by now, probably due to the clumps of drying blood and hair insulating it. She has her black bag sitting on her lap.

Logan turns on his headlights and the window wipers. He pulls out of his parking spot and onto the road. She hasn’t told him where she lives, but he thinks its close, on this side of town. They come to a red light and he pulls the car to a stop and then turns to look at her. She has her eyes closed and her head dipped forward. He wishes she had someone else she could call, but the only person he can think of is that little guy she eats lunch with, the one who was with her when he busted her headlights. Or maybe Weevil. They seem to be friends. He knew she was with Troy, until Troy was suddenly gone after all that shit with the missing car. He looks at the clock on his dashboard. It reads 1:24am, and he wonders if his dad is back from L.A. yet, where he disappeared to after Logan’s stunt at the food kitchen. His back is still healing and if he leans too hard back against the driver’s seat, he can feel the scabs rubbing against the fabric of his shirt. He grips the steering wheel and turns left, to the poor part of Neptune.

She is quiet during the drive and leans her head against her arm and her arm against the window, rocking silently with the movement of the car at each stoplight. He turns the radio off and Veronica looks up and squints at the street lamps and the stoplights, and then closes her eyes again, slouching further down into the passenger seat, her face pale and wet with perspiration.

“Can you stop the car?” she asks, suddenly, and he pulls over on the side of the road and turns his emergency lights on.

She opens up the passenger door and stumbles a few steps out onto gravel path before he hears her throw up. He looks straight ahead, at the road, though there aren’t many cars on this stretch between the 09 and 08 zip codes. After a few minutes she moves closer to the car and sits down on the gravel. He sees her through the door she left open, rifling through her purse.

Logan leaves his keys in the ignition and gets out of the car. He approaches from behind her and his shoes displace gravel with each step. Tentatively, he touches her shoulder. She flinches and he moves his hand.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

He can’t see her face, but she nods her head, and he thinks she might have been crying. Finally, she dredges up what is probably a dirty tissue from her purse and wipes her face with it. Afterwards, she just holds it in her fist.

“I can drive slower,” he says.

“I don’t know if that will help,” Veronica says. Her voice shakes when she speaks, though he can tell she is trying to control it. It reminds him of the way she cried at Lilly’s funeral, trying to stop herself, wiping furiously at the tears that dripped down her face, how he kept passing her tissues from the box at the end of the aisle. She rolls the tissue up and shoves it into her pocket.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?” he says quietly.

“They don’t really do anything for a concussion unless it gets worse. I think it’s been the same this whole time. I don’t think it’s deep enough to need stitches.” A car drives past, slowing down to watch them as though they are a high-interest spectacle before speeding to the next red light.

When Logan went to the hospital for his concussion, the doctors did a bunch of tests to check his motor function and mental capacity. He even had follow up appointments where he had to answer questions about his mood and ability to concentrate. But, other than that, the doctors didn’t actually do much besides take his blood pressure to check for internal bleeding.

“I’ll take you home then,” he says.

“Can I just sit here for a minute?” she asks.

“Just sit in the car. This isn’t the best area,” he says. Then, more gently, “Come on. I’ll open the window.”

She sighs and stands up. He puts his arm out and she does reach for it, grabbing him around the forearm for balance and he walks her slowly to the car. He helps her into the seat again and closes the door. She rolls the window down and puts on her own seatbelt.

When he gets back in the car, he roots around in the center console for a piece of gum, which he hands to her.

“Thanks,” she says, and she opens the wrapper and sticks the gum in her mouth. She shoves the wrapper into her purse.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Where do you live now, by the way?”

“Oh,” she says, like she has completely forgotten he wasn’t around for her move. “Next street, make a left. Then it’s in the complex on the left.”

“Okay,” he says. He drives slowly, tries to accelerate and decelerate slowly, too. He is sure if there were anyone from the sheriff’s department around, they would think he was a drunk driver trying not to attract attention. Luckily, he thinks they must all be patrolling by the bars or asleep outside of donut shops.

He turns at the street she indicated and keeps going until she has him turn again. He notices the streets are not well lit. They pass a parking lot where one car sits idling with its with headlights on, facing the street, like a signal. A beater is parked right next to it and the driver stands between the two cars, smoking. Both drivers watch them drive by. Finally, they arrive at a little apartment complex. Some of the apartments have blue-lit windows as TV screens flash between light and dark scenes. From the parking lot, Logan can see a pool and a bunch of clothes hanging outside people’s apartments. He feels a strange curiosity to see what it looks like on the inside. He doesn’t think he has ever been inside of an apartment. He eases into the lot that extends around the property.

“Which one is yours?” he asks her.

“Oh,” she says, suddenly flustered, as though she had fallen asleep during the last part of the ride. “Umm. Turn left up ahead.” He turns. “Yeah. This is it.” She points. Her apartment looks like all the other apartments, but without any of the toys or shoes sitting outside the door. There is a light on inside and he wonders if maybe her dad came home early. But then he remembers the dog. He puts the car into park in one of the empty spots. He has serious misgivings about just dropping her off at her empty apartment.

“Thanks for the ride,” she says and opens the door, lighting up the car’s interior. She pushes the button on her seatbelt and it withdraws, releasing her. “Let’s do this again, never.”

“Veronica,” he says and she turns to look at him. In the light, he can see that her bump is purple and the cut at the center of it is still bleeding. She is squinting in the light and kind of smiling at him, in a strange way. She looks pale, but maybe it is just that the blood is so red, especially where it is still wet, that she looks whiter in contrast. He knows in that moment that he can’t just leave her. “You look like you just came back from the dead. You can’t even walk straight and you have a concussion. I don’t think you should be alone.”

Logan turns the car off.

“I won’t be alone. I have Backup.”

“And I’m sure the 911 operator will understand him clearly if you start seizing and he needs to call for an ambulance.”

“Ha ha,” she says, though it isn’t real laughter, though there’s a level of fear to it. “I’m fine.”

“Veronica, it looks really bad.” But what he is thinking is: you look like Lilly when she died. It was never really clear to him if Lilly died with the impact or if there were minutes or an hour maybe where she could have been saved if only someone had been there, if only someone had called an ambulance. He is thinking, too, of Veronica crying at the homecoming memorial for Lilly, of the tapes she gave him. He was wondering if she watched them first, or has been watching them, over and over again, just to see Lilly alive, to imagine that it never happened. They were so young, such different people, it is almost like an entire lifetime has elapsed since then, since the Veronica sitting in front of him and the Veronica on that tape.

“Why do you even care what I do?” Veronica asks. “We’re not even friends anymore.”

The car door is still open and a breeze rushes through it. But he is thinking of Veronica behind the camera, filming his reaction to Lilly’s homecoming dress so she could tease him about it later. He is thinking of her stupid knee socks, of him and Lilly and Duncan sitting on the metal bleaches to watch her soccer games and then making Mr. Kane take them all out for ice cream after.

“Why’d you give me those tapes?” he counters, looking forward as he says it. He can’t look her in the face and still think of her as the old Veronica. He has to look away. Because that’s why he’s doing this. For Lilly’s Veronica.

“For Lilly,” she answers without so much as a breath. He looks at her then.

“Okay,” he says and gets out of the car. He pockets the keys and walks around to her side before she has a chance to fall gracelessly out of the car on her own.

“Logan,” she warns, as he picks up her purse and lifts her out of the car.

“For Lilly,” he says. He closes the door behind her and locks the car with his key fob. He puts the keys into his pocket and wraps an arm around Veronica’s shoulders, guiding her to the staircase across the slick pavement. She smells like blood and stomach acid and sweat. After a few stumbling paces, she stops fighting him and he half-carries her up the stairs. At the landing, she reaches into her bag for her house key and misses the keyhole a few times before unlocking the door.

He feels alternatively like a spy in an enemy fortress and or a time traveler, having traveled back to a time when he and Veronica were friends.

“Hey boy,” she says to the dog as soon as the door opens enough for him to stick his nose through the crack. He sniffs them. “Do you need to go outside?” she asks, as though she is going to walk him herself.

“You can’t take him like this. I’ll take him in a little bit,” Logan offers as Veronica switches the light on. He is still holding her by the shoulders, her body shaky.

He feels like he can see the entire length of the apartment from the front door. A little kitchen with old appliances and chipped cabinets. A living room only big enough for a chair, a couch, and a TV. A hallway lined with pictures that must lead to the bedrooms and the bathrooms. The apartment smells of tomato sauce, and he sees a pot in the sink, half filled with soapy water. There is a pile of dirty plates and a bowl next to the sink. On the floor, there is a dog bowl with water spilled all around it.

It all makes him wonder how long it has been since her dad has left, and he thinks of how Veronica never stayed home alone before everything happened. If her parents were going to be out, she slept at the Kane’s, or maybe, after pleading, at her house with Lilly and the pit bull. He steers Veronica to the couch and deposits her there. She flops down and the dog climbs up next to her, laying his big head in her lap. She pets him absent-mindedly and he angles his head upwards to smell her bloody hands. He whimpers as though the smell is too strong.

Veronica looks like she is ready to just fall asleep on the couch with her head still bleeding all over her face.

Inside the apartment, he can’t feel like her enemy anymore and it snaps him into action.

“Do you have a first aid kit?” Logan asks.

“Umm. You could check in the bathroom cabinet,” she says. “Never mind. I’ll just…” she says pushing herself up on the arms of the couch, swaying. “I need to clean up anyway.”

Logan grabs her arm and walks her down the hall, pausing at another light switch. She leans over the sink and turns on the water to wash her hands. In the fluorescent light of the bathroom, she looks worse than she did in the car.

The dog follows her and curls up on the floor between Veronica’s feet and the toilet.

“You don’t have to stand there,” she says. “If you can take Backup, I promise I will not die during the 2 minutes you are gone.”

He looks at her skeptically, as she leans forward against the sink for balance. She looks more alert now, examining her wound in the mirror. She pulls the sweater over her head and drops it on the floor. She opens a drawer, withdraws a small blue towel, wets it with warm water, and presses it against her head.

“Okay,” he says.

He senses that she doesn’t want him here for this, so he heads into the kitchen and finds the dog’s leash rolled up in a ball on the counter. When he picks it up, the dog comes running from the bathroom and sits, his tail wagging side to side underneath him. He latches the leash to the dog’s collar and takes Veronica’s keys from where she left them on the counter. He pulls the door closed with a click and makes sure it is locked before allowing the dog to lead him to a small patch of grass a few feet away, that seems to have been planted for this exact purpose. The dog relieves himself against a little gray statue and trots back to the stairs obediently, pulling Logan with him.

He is glad for the dog because he can’t remember which is Veronica’s apartment number until Backup pulls him toward it. He unlocks the door with the same key Veronica used and lets himself and the dog in. After Logan unhooks him from his leash, the dog walks down the hallway and curls up against the bathroom door, which is now closed. From behind it, Logan hears water running, the shower, he thinks. He is about to walk back to the couch to wait when amid the sound of falling water, he hears her crying. He doesn’t know what to do—if she needs help, she would ask, wouldn’t she?—so he just sits down with the dog in the hallway and pets its warm head. He stays close. He rubs his eyes. He’s been awake for too long today and he is sitting on the floor in Veronica Mars’ apartment listening to her cry in the shower after being bludgeoned with a camera. After a few minutes, the water and the crying stops. Then there’s a gasp and a hiss. Backup stands up unceremoniously and whimpers at the door, nudging his nose against the door jam and leaving a wet trail of snot or drool in his wake.

“Are you okay?” Logan asks, adopting some sense of urgency from the dog.

“Yeah,” she says. “Just stupid,” he can hear her mutter to herself. The dog’s ears perk up at her voice. “Can you maybe get me a shirt? Just like… anything you see. There’s probably something not covered in blood on the floor in my room.” The way she says this comes out sounding like an apology, or maybe she is just embarrassed that he is still here. But he can’t leave. She can’t even walk from the couch to the bathroom.

“Yeah,” Logan says. He debates making a comment about not wanting clean underwear, just to lighten the mood, but he thinks maybe this new Veronica wouldn’t think it was funny.

Instead, he just walks two steps further and peers into both bedrooms. Her father’s is sparse, just the bed, dresser, and nightstands he recognizes from their old house, a closet door open just enough that Logan can see coats and pants hanging on plastic hangers. There isn’t even a master bathroom.

Veronica’s room has a desk with her computer sitting on top of it, posters on the walls, and a bedspread that is decidedly not pink. He turns the light on and sees a pair of plaid pajama bottoms and a discarded gray t-shirt lying on top of the bed. He grabs them for Veronica. He is sure she must need the pants, too. Hers are probably covered with sand.

As he turns to leave, he notices a creepy bulletin board behind her desk that has a few pictures of Veronica and Lilly, but also of a bunch of pictures other people caught in compromising positions through the windows of the Camelot Motel. Veronica’s part time job. He thinks of how she must see these pictures from her spot in the bed when she wakes up every morning. He turns the light off and leaves the room.

He knocks on the bathroom door. A moment later, it opens just enough for a skinny arm to emerge and grab at the pile of clothes before disappearing back inside. Logan hears stumbling and rustling sounds as she dresses. When the door opens again, she is dressed and pressing a bloody washcloth to her head with one hand while leaning her body heavily against the sink. The air is humid and smells like gardenias. Both the sink and the shower look like crime scenes someone hastily tried and failed to scour completely, pink stains marring their otherwise white surfaces. Backup squeezes past him into the bathroom to smell all of the discarded items on the floor. A pile of bloody towels sits behind her, next to the sweater and pants she wore earlier, and her heavy black boots. Her hair, still wet, drips onto her skin of her neck. Her eyes and nose are pink, and she has a faint trace of black makeup smudged over her eyes. The first aid kit sits unopened on the sink, which is dirty with sand and blood flecks.

“Hey,” he says. “Maybe you should sit down?”

She scoffs, but lets him inch her backwards around the towels so that she can sit on the toilet lid. Logan takes the opportunity to wash her blood off his hands from earlier.

“There are some butterfly bandages in there. I don’t think I can hold the skin together and put it on at the same time,” she explains. “So, if I push the skin together, can you stick the bandage on?”

“I can do that.” Logan opens the first aid kit and takes out an antiseptic wipe and a few bandages, examining the different sizes for one that would fit. He assumes the butterfly bandage is one with a weird shape, but she must sense his hesitation.

“It’s obviously the one that has wings. Just bring the whole thing over,” she says sharply.

“Did anyone ever tell you that you have a horrible bedside manner?” he retorts, approaching her with four bandages and the antiseptic wipes in hand. Backup sits down on Veronica’s other side and stares at Logan.

“And here I thought I was the patient in this scenario,” she says as plucks the butterfly bandage out of his hand.

“Oh, so you do want to play doctor,” he teases. He sets the other bandages down on the counter and opens two of the packets containing antiseptic wipes.

“Is this some kind of fantasy of yours?” she says.

“None of my sexy doctor fantasies involve this much blood. Major turn off,” he says but she doesn’t laugh like he expects her to. Instead, she looks nervous. “Okay, so, on the count of three, move the washcloth.” Logan brandishes the antiseptic wipes, holding them out in front of him, close to her head.

"Hold it. Do you even know what you’re doing?” she asks.

“Wipe it off, stick the bandaid on?” Logan says.

She sighs. “You put half of it on, wait for me to push both sides of the cut together, and then you push the other side down.”

“So it holds it together, like stitches?” he asks.

“Yeah, I guess it’s kind of like stitches. Are you ready?”

“Are you?”

“Maybe I should stand over the sink, so I can see,” she says. She stands and shuffles over to the sink, using the countertop to support her weight.

“Ready?” she asks.

“Yeah. On three. 1, 2, 3,” he says and she removes the washcloth, which causes blood to bubble out of the wound. He wipes it off the best he can, but every time he touches it, her whole body tenses and she holds her breath. “Okay,” he says. She takes the wipe from him and presses it to her head to stop the bleeding. He opens the bandage and she moves her hand just enough for him to press it down above the wound.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” she says as she presses her bruised skin toward the bandage and Logan pushes the other side of it down. Her eyes are watering and her face is suddenly pale again. With the bandage secure, she slides down slowly into a heap on the floor and passes out. Her fall is so slow and graceful, like a ballerina. He doesn’t even think for a second she isn’t in control of it until she stays down there without moving.

“Hey, wake up,” he says, but receives no response.

Logan kneels next to her and tries to stop Backup from licking her face, which is covered in sweat. Little droplets of blood form on either side of the bandage, so he rummages through the kit again for a larger one to put over it. He can’t find a washcloth that isn’t already dirty, so he uses toilet paper to wipe her face with cold water. The touch or maybe the cold rouses her and she blinks into consciousness.

“Did I just black out?” she asks from the floor. Her voice sounds small and unsure, for the first time tonight. She wipes the tears from her eyes with her hand, smearing her eye makeup worse. She tries to push herself up, but she is shaking.

“Yeah,” he says, still crouching at her side. “It was for less than 2 minutes, but you still look like shit.”

“I feel like shit,” she says quietly. “That really hurt.”

“Come on,” Logan says and reaches underneath her. He picks her up and carries her back out to the living room, despite her feeble protests. Without the boots on, she is lighter, like he imagines a child would be. Her head feels warm against his chest, but the rest of her body is limp in his arms. Backup follows at his heels with a cursory growl.

“Chill,” Veronica says in a kind of tired whisper, and though she doesn’t sound particularly commanding, the dog immediately starts wagging his tail again. Logan sets her down on the couch and she closes her eyes. Backup sits on the floor in front of her, breathing in her face. Without opening her eyes, she tells him to lay down, and he does.

“Do you have ice?” Logan asks, though he is really asking for permission to look for it.

"Freezer," she says.

He finds an ice pack, the kind for used school lunches, and wraps it in a paper towel from a roll sitting on the counter. She opens her eyes when he approaches and takes it from him. She holds it to her head, wincing.

"Can I use your computer?" Logan asks before she can fall asleep again. “Since you declined real medical advice, we should at least look online.”

“Bring it. I’ll put the password in,” she says airily. He is already most of the way down the hallway. As he unplugs her laptop from its charger, he sees she has a pad of paper with a to do list. He reads the first three bullet points, but after those three, the writing looks so rushed he doubts Veronica could even read it. What he does read says:

• L shoes?  
• English response journal  
• Spanish test

He brings her laptop to the couch and opens it. She puts in her password and he takes the computer to the recliner chair. He sets the laptop down on his lap. She already looks a little better for laying down, her face pink again.

He searches Google for information on concussions and summarizes aloud for Veronica.

“You can sleep, but you have to wake up every 3 hours to make sure you aren’t getting worse. It looks like you probably do have a concussion.”

“It didn’t feel like I got hit that hard,” she says.

“Didn't you realize it was bleeding?”

“Not until I already ran a block and felt it on my face.” She adjusts the ice pack to cover more of the bruise.

He wonders if she had known the severity of it from the onset if she would have just run to her car like a normal person, instead of running all the way to the beach.

“Do you have a headache?” he asks, scrolling through a list of symptoms, ignoring the ones he already knows she has: problems with coordination and balance, sleepiness, nausea and dizziness.

“Yeah.”

“Mental confusion?”

“No?” The website says to ask athletes the name of the venue they are in, as well as the period of the game and the score, so he tries to think of something to ask her.

“Where are you right now?” he asks her.

“On the couch in my apartment,” she answers. “It is 2004. George Bush is the president. Last week you organized fistfights between homeless people. Can I go to sleep now?”

“Okay, okay,” he says, wondering how long it would take people to forget about that. His friends are still giving him high fives for it, but it makes him feel a little sick and a little ashamed when he thinks about it, and not just because his scars are still healing, prickling over and forming scabs that catch on his t-shirt if he isn’t careful. He keeps scrolling on her computer, just to make sure he didn’t miss anything.

“Are you staying?” she asks, though he can’t quite tell from her voice if it means she wants him to or not. She just sounds so tired, like she might fall asleep mid-sentence. She grabs at a blanket draped over the back of the couch and tugs it over herself, but leaves her bare feet exposed. She kicks at it as though to pull it over her feet.

“Yeah,” he says, and closes her laptop screen. He tries to come up with some explanation for how he can go so quickly from hating her to taking care of her, but it doesn’t completely make sense to him either, and it’s almost 3 in the morning and he has almost been awake for 21 hours straight. So, he just doesn’t say anything.

He takes out his cell phone and sets an alarm for three hours from now. By the time he turns off the overhead light and stumbles in the dark to the recliner chair he remembers from their old house, Veronica’s breathing has evened out. He lies in the chair and reaches for the blanket folded over the back of it. He listens to Veronica’s breathing and his own and then the quiet snuffles of the dog asleep on the carpet. The sense of calm he feels in her living room makes him realize just how anxious he has felt since the time he first saw her running by the beach, how afraid he was that he was going to leave her there to bleed out on the sand.

Somehow, her apartment reminds him of sleeping in the Kane's basement, listening to Veronica, Lilly, and Duncan snore because he would always fall asleep last, once whatever movie they were watching ended. They would never believe him that they all snored. It didn’t bother him. It wasn’t too loud, just loud enough for Logan to know he wasn’t alone.

Though he isn’t exactly comfortable sleeping on the recliner, the room feels inviting and warm. Maybe it’s the clutter or the worn furniture, but it feels good to him. He falls asleep soon after extending the foot rest and closing his eyes.

The first time he wakes is because he hears Veronica mumbling in her sleep.

“But you’re dead,” she is saying, or at least it sounds like that’s what she’s saying. “Not the same thing.”

Logan listens, but she doesn’t say anything else, just mumbles nonsensically like Dick sometimes does when he’s drunk.

“Veronica?” he says and in the dark, he can see her shift in the blanket. “Are you awake?”

“What?” Her voice is thick with sleep.

“You were saying something. Are you okay?”

“It was a dream,” she says as though she is convincing herself. Her voice sounds like it, too, is part of a dream. “Lilly said we match.”  
  
Logan doesn’t answer right away. He dreams of Lilly too often. It’s like she doesn’t want to stay dead, or something. She has to come back the only way she can, as an apparition of his conscience. She asks him to take care of Duncan and to figure out what’s happened to Veronica. Sometimes she appears in his dreams just to tell him to stop fucking up.

"I see her sometimes, too," he admits to the dark room. He stares at the ceiling, at the shadows made by the lights in the parking lot around the apartment complex. He lets his eyes close. Minutes pass and Logan can’t tell if she is still awake until she speaks again.

"Logan?” Veronica says, her voice just above a whisper.

“Yeah?”

“Can you get me the blanket from my bed? It’s freezing.”

“No problem,” he says and gets up, switching on a lamp. The apartment is warm. He remembers how donating blood made him feel cold and again, he wonders if he should just take Veronica to the hospital. He doesn’t know how much blood she lost. He can’t check her vital signs. He doesn’t know anything.

Instead, he pulls the white comforter off her bed and drapes it over her on the couch.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks.

“Just tired,” she says.

He decides not to change the alarm, which is set to go off in less than two hours. He is afraid that if he sleeps too long, he might miss some important sign, another thing that would be his fault.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who left comments or kudos!

At 9, Logan's alarm goes off again and he turns it off as Backup comes running into the living room, growling low. “It’s fine. Just the alarm,” he tells the dog. Logan pats Backup on the head and the dog’s tongue slides lazily out of the side of his mouth. A minute later, Backup must decide he has had enough and goes to the water dish in the kitchen. Logan hears him slurping.

He walks down the hall to Veronica’s room to wake her up.

“Veronica,” he says, but she doesn’t stir. He gently touches her shoulder to shake her. When she wakes, she is pushing and fighting Logan’s hands, breathing heavily, as though disoriented and afraid, he thinks. He takes a step away from her bed to give her space.

“You okay?” he asks.

She looks wildly around her bedroom as if trying to piece her current situation together from the things she remembers. The mid-morning sun streams in from the window, and makes little rainbows on her blanket. A sweater dangles over the back of her computer chair like a cape. Her bandage looks the same as it did three hours ago. But she stares at Logan with fear in her eyes as if she is trying to figure out why he is in her bedroom and Logan feels his stomach drop. Did he miss some sign earlier and now she has a fucking brain bleed and like amnesia or some shit like that? If Lilly was here, she would fucking kill him.

He watches Veronica and he can see the exact moment she fully wakes into herself. He exhales a breath he didn’t realize he was holding.

“Sorry,” she says, moving her hair out of her eyes with her hand, careful to avoid the bandages. “I’m fine.”

“What the fuck, Veronica?” he says, but it sounds more relieved than angry.

“Nightmare,” she answers and looks away.

In her bed, engulfed by decorative pillows, she looks tiny. He wonders how often she dreams of Lilly dying. He knows that she was with her father when they found the body, that her father had to pull Veronica away, that she got some of Lilly’s blood on the bottoms of her shoes; he knows how horrified she was when she realized it, walking though the kitchen in the old house as her mother nursed a drink at the table. He knows her mother poured a glass for Veronica so she would be able to sleep. He thinks Veronica must have been the one to tell him these details. Duncan hadn’t been able to tell him anything.

Logan has nightmares, too. The most frequent is one where he tries to fight back against his father, but is paralyzed, and all he can do is leave his body and watch it all happen, begging him over and over to stop, apologizing for whatever asesine thing he did to deserve it. In these dreams, he is usually a child and only thing he can move are his eyes. Other times, he dreams of Lilly with the same paralyzation, unable to stop her killer, unable even, to see his face, as though he has no face at all.

“Are you going to take off?” Veronica asks, looking past him at the wall.

Theoretically, if she survived the past 6 hours without getting worse, she is probably going to be okay. He could back out now and she could call her lunch friend to come stay with her. But he understands the kind of person she is now, because he is the same way. She doesn’t like to ask for help. She never did. She used to ask for it in other ways—like calling Lilly to go to the movies if her parents were fighting, making excuses to get out of the house. Lilly would find things out in other ways too and tell Logan about them, and Logan would tell Duncan, who would try and do something nice while still acting oblivious about why Veronica was upset in the first place. He is almost positive that she wouldn’t ask for this kind of help from her friend.

“Do you want me to leave?” he asks, carefully, raising an eyebrow. Truthfully, he thinks his dad might be coming back today and he would rather have an excuse not to be there. “I don’t have anything going on, if you want company.”

She doesn’t make eye contact with him.

“How do you feel?” he asks.

“Umm. I think I feel a little better. I still have a headache, but I can probably take some Advil.” She toys with the edge of her comforter, squeezing it and then releasing it. He notices that she has her head pressed up against the pillows and that she is holding it unnaturally still.

"Do you think you could walk?” Logan asks, not quite believing her.

“Yeah, I think so.”

He stands there and waits until she pushes back the comforter and the sheet and maneuvers herself to the edge of the bed, leaving her mismatched pillows disheveled. She slides down so that her bare feet make contact with the carpet. Logan places himself strategically a few steps in front of her. She stands still for a few seconds, holding onto the bed, before she lets go. She takes a few normal looking steps, but slowly begins to fall forward, reaching both arms out in front of her to meet the carpet.

“Whoa,” Logan says and catches her by the arms. He holds on as she comes to a sitting position on the floor. “What is it? Are you dizzy still or is it coordination?”

“Dizzy,” she says. Her hands grasp one another in her lap, and she looks down at them. Logan can hear the way she inhales and exhales slowly, as if to calm herself. He kneels down on the floor so they are both at the same level.

“Is it worse than last night?” Logan asks her, very seriously, studying the muscles of her face for any indication that she might be lying.

“No,” she says, looking at him for the first time, and he really wants her to be telling the truth. “It just… it feels like my head is so heavy. Maybe if I eat something,” she suggests.

“Do you have a doctor?” Logan asks.

“Yeah,” she says.

“I think you should call. If it’s getting worse, it could be a sign of something bad, like a blood clot.” He remembers the ER doctor warning his father of blood clots when Logan had his concussion. It was enough to freak him out until a few days had gone by.

Veronica stays sitting on the carpet and he can see her body tense with that information. She abandons what he thinks are breathing exercises and wrings her hands together. He suddenly doesn’t know what to do with his own hands, like they are two leaden weights attached to his body. He presses his open palms into the carpet.

“Hey,” he says to temper it. “It’s probably fine. But at least a doctor would be able to tell you what to do to heal.” Her breathing comes in bursts. Logan sits down on the floor next to her and realizes she is either crying or trying hard not to. She wipes both of her eyes.

“I just thought it would be better when I got up,” she says, but her voice kind of breaks and Logan looks down at her hands. He can’t look at her face. She presses the fingernails of one hand into the fingertips of the other, making little rainbow-shaped indentions, until she manages to calm herself down, and Logan watches, seeing some of the Veronica he used to know in these actions. She wipes her eyes with her indented fingertips, displacing a few tears. “I think I need to call my dad.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Logan says, though it is clear it is the course of action she had been trying to avoid since the night before. “Do you want me to get your phone?” he asks, remembering the pile of her possessions she left in the kitchen.

“Yeah,” she tells him. She uses her arms to pull her body back toward the bed.

“Here,” he says.

He holds out his hands and she uses them to lift herself up and maneuver onto the bed. She falls down into her pillow fort and turns her body away from him, her back shaking as she begins to cry. He doesn’t know what to say, but he knows that if Lilly were here, she would climb into bed beside Veronica and rub her back, telling her over and over again that she would be okay. But he is not Lilly, so instead, he walks out of the room and into the kitchen, where he stalls under the guise of looking for her cell phone as he waits for her to finish crying.

He finds her phone in her purse on the kitchen table. He also finds the broken camera, the corner of it red with dried blood and even some hair. He drops it back into her purse in disgust. As he waits for her breathing to return to normal, he studies the pictures on the walls and notices that none of them contain Veronica’s mother, as if she had disappeared from their consciousnesses as fully and as quickly as she had disappeared from Neptune. He remembers being happy at the time when suddenly, it seemed, everyone knew she was gone. He remembers feeling that Veronica and her dad deserved it for going after the Kane’s. But now, in the empty, parentless apartment with Veronica crying in her bedroom, he feels guilty for it, as if it were his anger alone that made her leave, his stupid, selfish desires for retribution and justice against Veronica that made all of this happen. A mother, even an alcoholic mother like Logan’s or Veronica’s, would know what to do in this situation.

Backup lifts his head at Logan in greeting, and so Logan pats his head. He wonders what Veronica is going to tell her father, how she will explain Logan’s presence in their apartment, if she will, and what it means now that he stayed. He thinks maybe Veronica will put it into words that will help Logan explain it to himself—why he is still here, why he can’t leave her here alone when months ago, he guiltily wished it were her instead of Lilly—if all of this is penance for that one stray thought that he still wishes he didn’t mean.

He enters the bedroom when he can’t hear her crying anymore. Her eyes are pink, the way they were the night before, and she looks tired again. He hands her the cell phone and retreats to the door to give her the privacy it seems she is waiting for.

She holds down one of her speed dial buttons and Logan only hears her say, “Hey pops,” before he goes to the living room to wait. He inspects the bookshelf for something to occupy himself, studies the titles of DVDs and VHS tapes collecting dust, little trinkets from the San Diego Zoo and Padres Bobble-Heads, pictures of Veronica as a little girl in a blue t-shirt, laying on a blanket in the sun, and in her uniform holding a soccer ball between her hands. He feels as though he’s searching for something, but doesn’t know exactly what.

After a few minutes, she calls for him, and he hurries back into the room, as though he had actually been caught snooping.

“He wants to talk to you,” she explains, holding the phone out.

Logan takes the cell phone from Veronica. “Uh, Mr. Mars,” he says into the receiver.

“Logan,” Mr. Mars says in greeting. His voice isn’t exactly unfriendly, but it is far from the way he used to sound on the days when he would give Logan a ride home from the Kane’s. He wonders how much her dad knows about the past year; for example, if he knows Logan was the one who attacked Veronica’s car with a tire iron at the beach a few weeks ago. He finds himself hoping Veronica is as secretive with her father as she used to be with her friends. “I just wanted to thank you for bringing her back home and making sure she was okay. I appreciate it. I know the two of you are not very friendly anymore, but thank you for doing the right thing.”

“No problem, Mr. Mars.”

“I just want to make sure I have the story right. Can you please confirm for me that her head is no longer bleeding and the two of you put a bandage on it?” In the background, Logan can hear the sounds of cars driving by, as though Mr. Mars is on the side of a highway somewhere with his windows wide open.

“Yeah.”

“And that dizziness is the only other major concern.”

“Yeah. She uh, can’t walk straight,” Logan says as Veronica gives him a death stare from her bed.

“Any other symptoms she may have failed to mention? Like nausea, loss of consciousness, loss of hand-eye coordination?”

Logan walks into the kitchen so that Veronica doesn’t overhear.

“Uh, well, she threw up last night and passed out when we put the bandage on. But I woke her up every three hours and she doesn’t seem to have gotten any worse. She just doesn’t seem any better either.”

“Thanks, Logan. I’ll give the doctor a call and see if she can squeeze Veronica in today. I’ll see if my friend Cliff can come stay with her until I get back tomorrow. I’m sure you’re anxious to get back home, but do you think you could wait until he gets there before taking off? Shouldn’t be too long.”

“I can stay,” Logan says, surprising himself.

"I’m sure Cliff would be able to get there in just an hour or so.”

“I don’t mind staying until you get home, if it’s okay. I have homework I need to do. It’s quieter here,” Logan explains, though even as he says it, he is sure Mr. Mars isn’t going to believe if and is going to tell him to leave, or suspect him of being up to something, or even suspect him and Veronica of being up to something. Which is why Mr. Mars’ response surprises him.

“Is your father home?” he asks, and Logan inhales audibly. The phone radiates heat against the side of his face, summoning a thin layer of sweat where the phone’s screen presses against his skin.

“Yeah,” Logan says and he hopes it comes out stronger than he feels as he says it.

“I’ll give your mother a call,” Mr. Mars says.

For a few years now, Logan has suspected that maybe the sheriff had an idea of a little of what Logan has spent his whole life hiding. He does not know how, unless he’s a walking textbook case, or his mother mentioned something. But after Homecoming, instead of taking Logan home, he took Logan and Veronica out for pancakes. By the time he dropped Logan off, his father had conveniently already left for L.A. There were other signs, too: parties broken up and parents called by the sheriff’s department; somehow, Logan’s mother was always the one who received those calls, discreetly, so that his father never knew. That stopped when Lamb took over.

“Thanks, Logan. But you really don’t have to. I can send my friend Cliff if you change your mind.”

“Don’t worry about it, Mr. Mars.”

“I’ll probably have him stop by later anyway. Can you put my daughter back on?”

“Sure thing,” Logan says and wipes his sweat off the phone’s screen with his hand. He walks back into Veronica’s room, where she is laying with her eyes closed, though obviously not asleep.

“Phone,” Logan says as he enters and hands it to Veronica, who scowls at him.

This time he stands there as she finishes the call.

“Yeah,” she says to her father, still staring at Logan. “I will.” He can almost hear Mr. Mars’ voice across the room, not individual words, just the general paternal tone of his voice. It strikes him that it is through other people’s fathers that he knows what paternal is supposed to sound like. “Dad!” Veronica says exasperatedly. “I know,” she says. “Okay. I love you too.”

When she hangs up, she flips the phone closed and drops it on the bed. “So you’re staying?” she asks, confused.

“Yeah,” Logan says. “I mean, unless you want me to go.”

“It’s not that. I just… why? I thought you hated me,” she says.

Logan looks down at his socks and realizes with a small pang that there is a tear in the left one, above his middle toe. He can see a square cutout of his own skin.

“I don’t. I mean, I was mad. It was a long time ago.” He can’t pinpoint when he stopped hating her. But he knows exactly when he realized that he missed her— she looked over his shoulder to watch the Kane’s footage for Lilly’s memorial video. She was the only person alive who understood, who could put his frustration into words—Lilly as a long distance commercial, she said. No one else understood the big hole that losing Lilly left, except probably the Kanes. No one else seemed to keep on missing her. No one else spoke to him like that, with real words that actually fucking meant something.

“And I thought I could get my homework done,” he says as Veronica narrows her eyes at him. “I have a paper due,” he says.

“Okay,” she says.

“I just need to get my computer and shower,” he says. “Will you be okay for like a half hour?”

“Yeah, go ahead,” she says. “Just… can you take Backup out and then feed him? Two scoops. His food is in the cabinet by his dish.”

“No problem,” Logan says.

Backup comes running when Logan grabs his leash and the front door key. He takes the dog to the same patch of grass and realizes, as the dog is in mid-stream, that the little stone statue is the virgin Mary. He laughs.

In the kitchen, he opens two cabinets in his search for the dog food, finding only pots, pans, and an entire shelf of canned soup, though he has a sudden, intense desire to open all of the drawers and all of the cabinets in the house, a curiosity that is only deepened by the thought of Veronica lying immobile in her bedroom. It is as though by looking at the things her and her father have bought and kept and used and forgotten about and rediscovered behind something else he could understand this new person she has become without him. He has always been one of those people who open bathroom cabinets and drawers in other people’s houses, looking for the things they keep hidden. He knows, for example, that Madison Sinclair takes anti-depressants, that Caitlin Ford keeps a topless picture of Madonna in her underwear drawer, that Casey Gant has a journal full of handwritten poems in his nightstand, and that Dick Sr. keeps a box of flavored condoms in the kitchen, in the back of the liquor cabinet. Backup seems to realize what Logan is looking for and sits in front of the cabinet in question. Under the dog’s watchful eyes, he feels somehow convicted. He opens the cabinet and scoops food into the dish while Backup waits patiently.

Logan decides to check on Veronica before he takes off, but she appears to be asleep when he looks in her doorway. “I’ll be right back,” he tells her. “And I’ll bring food. Call me if you need anything else.”

“Okay,” she says sleepily and gives a little wave.

He pockets her house key and his own keys and wallet. Outside, a child swims in the pool while a woman wearing big plastic sunglasses reads a magazine. A pregnant woman sits on the landing above Veronica’s, reading in the daylight. A guy in the lot vacuums out his car and nods to Logan as he approaches. Logan nods back and gets into his own car. He rolls the bloody towel up into a ball and throws it into the back. Then he checks the passenger seat for blood spots, but only sees the spot on the seatbelt where she touched it with her bloody fingers.

On the drive back home, he realizes how tired he still is after six hours of sleep. He thinks of this bad crash out on the PCH years ago, where a 17-year-old fell asleep at the wheel and drove his car through a light post at 70 miles per hour, tearing the metal in half as though it were tissue paper, or some other beautiful but easily destructible thing, like a painting. It was so frequently in the news, fueling the debate to move the driving age to 18, that he thought about it often, especially when driving at night when the roads were almost empty, when anything beyond the streetlights became unnavigable desert or sea, long black stretches leading to nowhere. He turns on the radio and decides to buy coffee on his way back, if there isn’t any in the kitchen.

At home, he sees only Mrs. Navarro on the way to his bedroom. His mother must be either still asleep or out to breakfast. He can’t hear anyone in the house, though that doesn’t always mean its empty—just that they are all sequestered in their separate spaces: his mother in her bedroom, Trina in hers, Aaron in the room he calls his office, Logan in the pool house, with Mrs. Navarro the only one able to traverse between each space, as invisible and undeterred as a spirit. The pool is probably the only truly shared space on the property, and even then, no one usually uses it at the same time.

As far back as he can remember, Logan has always felt like a visitor in his own home. They have always lived in places where nothing was really theirs; furniture, art, and wall colors chosen from galleries by a designer. His parents would just foot the bill to let their space become someone else’s vision, a work of art in itself, profiled on TV specials and in home design magazines. Each new house with its own color palette, its own furnishings, its own name to live up to, its own personality impressed upon it by someone else. People like his parents, families like his family, don’t keep the wax animals they buy their kids at the zoo, or the programs from their dance recitals or school plays flattened in a shoebox in the closet, or the seashells they painstaking collect while on vacation in Hawaii to use as paperweights or decorations, or the flowers they bring home for their mother on her birthday—no one presses the petals between the pages of book to dry, to become a kind of living skeleton of their love for her.

Once in his bedroom, Logan puts another change of clothes, his laptop, a book, and his phone charger into his backpack and then takes a quick shower. He throws his dirty clothes in the hamper. He brushes his teeth, uses and packs his deodorant, and grabs two bags of chips from the kitchen, all without speaking a word to anyone.

 

  
When Logan returns to the Mars’ apartment, holding a takeout bag with two breakfast sandwiches and a to-go cup of coffee, he finds that Veronica is not in her bedroom where he left her. Instead, she is leaning over the bathroom sink, hair in her eyes, scrubbing it furiously with some kind of cleansing wipe, though he can no longer see any of the bloody residue from the night before.

“How did you get in here?” he asks. “And should you be doing that right now?” Judging from the way she is using the sink to support her weight, Logan assumes she must have had a hard time getting into the bathroom by herself.

“I told you. I’m fine on my own,” she answers as she inspects the sink for any spots she might have missed. “And it was disgusting.”

He looks behind her to see that the shower is similarly clean and notices then that the whole room has that not-quite-lemon chemically clean smell. She throws the used wipe into the trash, which is already filled to the top with them, each similarly tinted pink with blood. They, along with the pile of dirty towels on the floor, are the only remaining evidence of last night’s mess.

“Are you hungry?” He holds up the take-out bag, its bottom gone translucent with grease on the drive over.

“I could eat,” Veronica says and washes her hands at the sink.

“Do you need help?” he asks, though he already anticipates her response.

“No,” she says.

“Okay,” he says and moves into the hallway, curious as to how she is going to get to the living room or even her bed without crawling.

He watches, amused as she places one arm against the sink for support and then transfers it to the wall when she reaches the doorframe. She leans her weight on the arm against the wall and is able to move slowly down the hallway with baby steps. She comes to an impasse where the hallway ends and she can’t quite reach any of the furniture.

“So, you could either solve this obstacle course or you just let me help you so we can eat this while it’s still warm,” Logan says. He shakes the bag for good measure and the paper-wrapped sandwiches jostle into each other.

Veronica rolls her eyes, but accepts the arm he offers. Her hands are still damp from washing, but warm. She must have washed her face, too, because the edges of the bandage are dark from where it came into contact with the water. He leads her to the couch and stands still as she lowers herself onto it. When she is seated, he passes the bag to her and goes into the kitchen to get his coffee from where he set it down on the table. Backup follows the smell of eggs and bacon and sits next to Veronica.

“I’m not sharing this with you,” she tells the dog.

Veronica hands Logan the second sandwich and they eat in relative silence. She takes small bites and eats slowly, finishing only half of the sandwich before leaning back on the couch.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she says, though she doesn’t look okay.

He gets up and he opens the cabinet closest to the sink, which is filled with an unmatched assortment of cups and mugs and some bowls that have handles like mugs do. He fills her a glass of water and brings it to her. She sips at the water slowly, wetting her lips, leaning her head back against the pillows with her eyes closed, before taking another small sip, the kind he imagines some small animal would take, like a squirrel or a bird.

“Do you want the garbage can?” What he is thinking is, if she has to throw up, there is no way she would be able to make it to the bathroom on her own.

But she shakes her head. He gets the garbage can from the kitchen anyway and sets it down next to her. It smells sweetly of old banana peels, though it is nearly empty.

“You don't have to act like you’re fine when you’re obviously not,” he says quietly.

“I’m not going to throw up,” she says.

“Well, I’m leaving this here just in case.” Logan moves back to the recliner chair, out of her way, and Backup comes closer to investigate, summoned maybe by the scent-memory of old meals.

Veronica takes another sip of water and closes her eyes for a few minutes. Logan finishes his sandwich, crumples the paper in his fist and tosses it into the open garbage can like a free throw.

After a few minutes, she takes another couple of bites. Finally, she takes off the top layer off the English muffin and eats it.

“Maybe I should have just made you toast,” he says. “Sorry. You don’t have to finish it. I can get something else.”

“It’s really fine,” she says. “I just feel really tired. I don’t feel sick.”

“I think like this is the longest you’ve sat with food in front of you without eating it since I met you,” he says, not expecting the frown that deepens along her face. Her eyes are open, though not looking at his. Instead, she stares into the kitchen, as though there is another person in the room, or maybe the ghost of one. “It just felt like the universe came unaligned for a minute there,” he says to solicit something other than the protracted stare into nothing.

“Thanks. You really know how to cheer a girl up,” she says sarcastically and rubs her eyes with her fingers.

“That's what I’m here for,” he says with false cheer.

Veronica readjusts her position on the couch and puts her feet up.

"Are you done?" he asks her, gesturing to the sandwich. She nods and he throws the remainder of it into the trash can. “Should I put this back?”

“Yeah. I’m good,” she says and Logan carries the trash can back into the kitchen, setting it in its place next to a tacky Chinese restaurant calendar printed on a bamboo scroll. The top of the calendar has a tree with pink and red blossoms. He stares at it and wonders why Veronica or her father hung it up.

“Did your dad call back?” Logan asks her. He grabs the strap of his backpack as he heads back into the recliner chair.

“Yeah. I have an appointment at 2, but I can call Cliff to take me.”

“Veronica, it’s fine. I’ll take you. I’m already here.”

“I just feel bad that you’re even here at all.”

“I don’t. I’m glad I was here,” he says. He is thinking of Veronica lying down on a cement pylon at the the beach, little streams of her own blood running down her face like strands of a spiderweb, her hands full of sand, easy prey for the right kind of person, or of her body in the moment he realized she was fainting, the cool sweat that bubbled out of her skin, or her body, heavy and pliant, like ocean water when it separates you from a long breath of salty air.

“You changed,” she says suddenly, looking at him. “I didn’t notice.”

He looks at her again and her face readjusts to something in his. It takes him a few seconds longer than it should to realize that she is talking about his clothes.

“Oh,” he says. “You didn’t notice I changed out of the shirt with your blood all over it?”

She laughs. “At least you didn’t have my blood on your hands.”

He laughs too. “You know, I did have your blood literally on my hands,” he says. “And surprisingly, under my fingernails.” It reminds him of the wound again, the real reason he is still here. The bandage is dark with absorbed blood. He can see part of her bruise, tinged with hints of blue along the edge of it, like frost clinging to the shaded part of a window pane. “We should change your bandage.”

Veronica groans. “Do you think it’s going to start bleeding again if we take it off?”

“Hopefully not, but the outer one looks pretty gross. Why? Are you going to black out again?” He asks her.

“I’m not squeamish.”

“No? Then why did you pass out?”

“Because it hurt,” she says. “And I probably lost a bunch of blood.”

He helps her back into the bathroom and she drops his arm in favor of the white porcelain of the sink. Her hands grip at the rounded edge, anchoring her in place. The motion accentuates the irritated skin of her knuckles like little pink hills lining the topography of a desert, their creases forming interconnected valleys along the pale surface of her skin, her fingers splayed against its surface, nails bitten down to the skin like thin white crescent moons. Did she always bite her nails? He doesn’t know. But, he supposes he doesn’t make a habit of studying Veronica Mars’ hands.

Logan catches his own reflection in the mirror and runs a hand through his hair instinctively.

“You shouldn’t have wasted your time cleaning. Now it’s just going to get dirty again.”

"I had to,” she says. “It was terrible! And some of us don’t have housekeepers. I couldn’t just leave it like that until my dad got home,” she says and touches the edge of the outer bandage with her fingers, as through she is debating ripping it off in one fluid motion.

“I could have helped you.”

“You probably don’t know how to clean anything. Besides, I’m not making you clean up my blood, even if we are enemies.” She says this last part as though it were a joke they frequently shared at their own expense. Logan tries not to let his reaction to the words show, but he can’t help the question that escapes him.

“Are we still enemies?” he asks and their eyes meet each other’s reflections in the bathroom mirror.

It feels different than making eye contact, as if he is looking instead at a picture of Veronica rather than the real thing. Maybe it is just the fluorescent light in the bathroom, but he notices her face has flushed with the effort of struggling with him down the hallway and that the space under her eyes is smudged with a faint purple undertone. Her bruise, though mostly covered by the bandage, looks terrible where it peeks out from underneath.

“You know what they say,” she says. In the mirror, her reflection smirks at him and he wonders if she can tell by looking at his reflection that he likes it.

“Don’t tell me. Keep your friends close but your enemies closer? What about in Neptune, where all of our friends are our enemies?”

“Ha ha,” she says, though she doesn’t smile at this. Instead, the arc of her lips straightens out and her eyes flick away from his, as if searching for something in the basin of the sink, a chip in the shining veneer, a speck of unwanted rust, a stray hair, maybe, but more likely staring at something he can’t see at all. But then she looks up again, trying on a different face, serious, suddenly. “No,” she says. “It’s always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much.”

Logan laughs and looks back at his own reflection to see how it looks on him. Under the bright light of the bathroom mirror, he looks almost pink, as though he might be blushing. “Oscar Wilde?” he guesses.

"Are you going to steal it for your voicemail message?” Veronica asks, turning her head to look at him, leaning, he notices, a little closer, as though it were all part of a game they only just started to play.

“I don’t need to steal from you. I have my own sources,” he tells her.

He has always had a good memory for lines. Maybe having two actors for parents predisposed him to have a feel for words, the pockets they fill, the way a re-appropriated quotation in the right setting can sometimes be more creative than an original thought. There is wisdom, too, in the words of these people who made it their lives’ goal to share them; they take on more meaning being copied down again and again by each new generation, applied to new and previously unimaginable situations.

“Did you memorize a book of quotations?” she asks him, seriously.

“No, just a good guess. It sounded like him.”

“How’s that?”

“Like a wise ass.”

“Takes one to know one,” she says and sticks her tongue out at him, a flash of pink and warm breath, before it disappears into her mouth again.

“Funny,” Logan says, but in the mirror, he is looking at her mouth, the way her lips press into each other. Veronica looks in the mirror again and Logan follows her gaze.  
  
"I think we should wait for the doctor to do it,” she says as she examines the wound again.

Logan watches her reflection in the mirror pull her hair back and inspect the bruising that continues past her hairline. She shivers and Logan is struck by the thought that an actual stranger could hit someone Veronica’s size, and a girl on top of it, this hard. It’s one thing when it’s a father dolling out punishment, but another entirely when it’s someone who doesn’t even know you. The hit was on target and deliberate. The man must have hit her so hard he broke her camera, judging by the blood and the way he found it in pieces in her bag.

“I bet the doctor will want to take it off anyway,” she says.

“It’s probably too late to get stitches.”

“You think it needed stitches?” Veronica asks, surprised.

She presses two fingers against the bandage and winces, pain flashing briefly across her face, quick as a shudder flash, before she adjusts her expression to hide it. It is this kind of hiding, so deliberate and so immediate, that invites his impulse for curiosity, that makes him want to search her apartment for secrets he can possess. He inhales stale apartment air and pushes his hands into his pockets.

“I don’t know. I’m not a doctor,” he says, looking down. “I just know you have to go right away, otherwise they won’t use them.

“How do you know that?”

“Personal experience.”

“What did you do?”

“Crashed my bike when I was nine,” he lies easily, the same lie he repeated to the family doctor after he stopped a glass vase thrown at him with his arms. It was always easy to lie; fear, he thinks, is the greatest motivator there is. A story about not wanting to look like a wimp in front of his friends and tying the wound up with a sweaty t-shirt. He learned early on that details are what make lies come to life, details so specific you can visualize them without even closing your eyes, the kinds of images other people can’t believe you made up, the real story hidden so deeply under them that he can almost forget it happened a different way.

“Did you get stitches?”

“Nope. That’s why I have a scar.” He bends his arm at the elbow and shows her the thin lines that run nearly invisibly across the inside of his forearm, white like the veins of a leaf.

“At least mine will be mostly covered by my hair,” she says.

“Let’s just let the doctor give you a new bandage, then.”

He holds her by her skinny wrists and leads her back to the couch, where she promptly falls asleep again.

He can see her like other guys might see her, the places on her body where attention gathers like extra fabric, the joking attitude, the magnetism of her whole image; but he sees, too, the way her eyes seem to know everything, as if she can see right through him and convict him, with just a glance, and the way she is a closed door, light from inside visible underneath; so different from girls like Madison Sinclair and Caitlin Ford, whose secrets are even mundane and boring, who can only be made happy with possessions, a place in the gossip, who exist to be watched, like a sensationalist news story you later find out to be false. It is about identity. It’s always been about identity since they first started to realize things like wealth and power were what pushed you forward, when the rules of wealth were taught to them like some complex game they can’t get out of. But Veronica is playing some other game. Or maybe the same game with different rules and a different objective, like a spy, and he is the only one who knows to watch her closely.

And here she is, asleep on the couch, snoring.

He gets the sense that her secrets are not secrets he can find, that she would leave no evidence, not like the scars that run down his back, hidden in plain sight. He always says they are old sunburn or from some accident, or a fight he didn’t lose, but only when he can’t hide them, or is too drunk to. His back has the uneven texture of rope or something woven. Skin grows back unevenly, leaving little holes like pockmarks or scar tissue, growing over on top of itself.

He sits up and Veronica doesn’t stir.

Inside her bedroom, he sits on the bed, which sinks under his weight. He knows there isn’t anything he could find that would explain everything to him, but all he needs is one thing. In her desk drawers, he finds only notebooks and folders filled with school work, pencils, pens, an agenda. He closes the drawer and stands at the doorway to the bedroom, but he can still hear Veronica breathing heavily in sleep.

In her closet, as he expects, there is a shoebox filled with pictures of Lilly, notes they must have exchanged. He sees Lilly’s familiar handwriting on one and puts the lid back on the shoebox. He wants to and doesn’t want to read her words. If he reads them, it would be as though she were in the room with him. He replaces the box underneath a pile of shoes in Veronica’s closet. Even in the dim light, he sees that all the dresses she used to wear are gone. Vaguely, he wonders if she sold them.

There is a pink firebox in the bottom drawer of her desk, locked by a combination. He tries Veronica’s birthday and Lilly’s birthday, but it doesn’t open. Morbidly, he tries the date of Lilly’s death, but still, it doesn’t open. He puts it back into the desk drawer, places the folders on top of it in the same order, and closes the drawer.

Still he notes the things he does not find: stale marijuana in a plastic baggie wedged between her mattress and the wall, an opened box of condoms in the nightstand, a flask filled with cheap vodka under her pillow, lacy black lingerie balled up in the back on her underwear drawer. He does find a half-empty bottle of a non-prescription sleep-aid in a basket on top of her nightstand, the business card of a grief counselor under a stack of highlighters in her desk, and a prayer card from Lilly’s funeral, its edges bent with wear, tucked into the corner of her mirror.

He doesn’t find anything to help him understand her, just enough to confirm most of the rumors about her are wrong.

He goes back out to the living room and Veronica is still sleeping on the couch.

The rest of the morning passes with Logan sitting at the Mars’ kitchen table with his laptop, typing until his wrists hurt an argumentative essay in which he argues that hard work is more important than talent, though talent makes hard work less painful. He couldn’t care less about it, but he needs to pass English and that means occasionally doing his assignments. Every so often, he looks over at Veronica, asleep on the couch, and takes a sip of his lukewarm coffee.

Around noon, his mother calls and speaks in a theatrical whisper. Logan goes into the bathroom to take the call and closes the door behind him.

“How’s Veronica?” his mother asks.

Aaron is definitely home by now. He pictures his mother sitting in the car to call him, somewhere his father won’t hear, smoking cigarettes with the phone nuzzled against her ear. She doesn’t like to smoke in the house or in the yard where photographers might get a picture of her for the tabloids. She likes to sit in the car with the windows barely cracked, smoking in secret while she listens to the radio.

“She’s okay,” Logan says.

He nudges a bloody towel with his toe. If he knew how to do laundry, he would offer to clean them, but he didn’t see a washing machine in the apartment either. Do they take it to one of those laundromats on the side of the highway? Is that what poor people do? His mother would know, but for some reason, he doesn’t want to tell her that Veronica doesn’t have a washing machine.

“Keith told me you are taking care of her while he is out of town.” She says this with a sense of pride, as though he didn’t just spend the previous weekend paying homeless people to fight each other.

“It’s nothing,” Logan says.

He doesn’t think his mother knows the full extent of his feud with Veronica, the way he told stories that he knew would hurt her, the way he made sure no one would be on her side, the way he had to have revenge on someone and she seemed the kind of person who would just take it. He is glad that the picture his mother has of him, for all her own failings, doesn’t include any of this.

“I think you should just stay there,” she says in a whisper. “Your father is in a mood.”

“Okay,” Logan says. He was sure his father would still be angry, about the fights and about the money, but mostly about the way Logan won.

“Also, Richard stopped by this morning. I told him you had an early dentist appointment.”

He wonders at his mother’s instinct to lie for him. Maybe she had heard Veronica had become a social pariah in the year since Lilly died. Maybe she was sparing his reputation. Maybe she didn’t want his father to know where he was.

“Thanks, mom.”

“Do you think this means you and Veronica are going to be friends again?”

“I don’t know, mom.”

“Just call before you head home,” she says. “Tomorrow is better.” He can hear her take a long drag on her cigarette and exhale before ending the call.

 

  
At 1:15pm, he wakes Veronica up and helps her back into her bedroom to get ready to leave. He closes the door, but stands on the other side of it as she undresses and dresses, just in case she falls. He listens for the uneven padding of her bare feet between her dresser and bed, her soft footfalls on the carpeted floor as it resigns itself to her weight, the scratch of her drawers opening and closing, the soft shuffling of her pajamas down her body and onto the floor, the groan of her mattress under her weight.

“Okay,” she calls and still, he knocks, just to be sure. “You can open it,” she says.

He turns the knob and moves toward her. She is wearing a striped t-shirt and a pair of loose-fitting jeans, and she has pulled her hair back with a rubber band messily. She is wearing a green hat that looks familiar to Logan. With the hat on, he almost can’t see the bandage on her head, or the bruise, which has started to morph into a dark purple under her skin, the color of rotten fruit.

At the doctor’s office, he helps her from the parking lot to the front desk, her holding onto his arm, taking slow steps.

Inside, the waiting room isn’t empty, but everyone sits with their magazines open, erecting little walls between them. Veronica’s name is called right when she finishes the paperwork and provides her new insurance card. Logan has to stand behind her, with a hand holding her shoulder to keep her in place. He holds her by the arm until a nurse brings a wheelchair that takes some cajoling to convince Veronica to sit on.

Logan wishes he brought his book, even though it has started to depress him, like most contemporary literature does; it’s like the authors can’t believe there’s anything good left in the world, or anyone left capable of loving someone in the right way. Still, Logan has always liked reading because it hollows out a place for him in someone else’s life, but what he likes even more is that no one expects it of him. They think because his father is who he is that he will never make a name for himself..

The walls of the waiting room have framed artwork – superimposed flowers in front of a desert landscape, a blurry cactus with a single, in-focus red bloom, a single holly berry growing in front of the snowy countryside. The chairs are not comfortable and the magazines are all four months old.

Veronica is gone for maybe thirty minutes when the same nurse reappears to wave Logan over to the doorway dividing the offices from the waiting room. He dutifully walks over and behind the door, he sees Veronica hunched over on an exam table, breathing slowly in and out through her mouth. Her eyes are red and her entire body is tense.

Dumbly, he looks to the nurse for clarification as to why they called him back here, when the doctor comes out from inside the exam room, unable to hide his frustration. He speaks quietly to Veronica, who is still scowling, and shakes his head.

The nurse holds a clipboard with a few sheets of paper stapled together. She places it under her armpit and gesticulates with her arm from the elbow down.

“She isn’t being compliant,” the nurse explains to Logan, in a whisper. “Are you her brother? Her boyfriend?”

“Friend,” he says.

The nurse leans forward conspiratorially. “Do you know who did this to her? She said she was accidentally hit with a camera, but the damage seems to tell a different story.”

“That’s what she told me,” he says.

“Before we release her, we just want to be sure that she isn’t in any further danger. I spoke to her father earlier and it seems he has been out of town. Does she have a boyfriend, who maybe…?”

“No,” Logan says. “I think she just pissed off the wrong stranger."

The nurse nods her head up and down. “Well, here is some information,” she says and hands him the packet from her clipboard.

The doctor approaches Logan and completely shifts in attitude, from annoyed to professional. He provides a verbal summary of what Logan assumes is in the care instructions in the packet the nurse gave him.

“She shouldn’t do any physical activity for the next few days. No sports or PE for at least a few weeks. There’s a note for her teachers on the last page. We changed her bandage. She should clean the wound, apply an antibacterial ointment, and change the bandage twice a day. Before bed and in the morning would be fine.”

“Okay,” Logan says. “What about the dizziness?”

“Rest. She just need to rest. But if you see any of the signs on this list, she should go straight to the emergency room.”

She gets back into the wheelchair without any help, while the doctor and nurse talk to Logan. He pushes her in the wheelchair back to the car.

“What happened?” Logan asks after he returns the wheelchair to the front desk and closes his car door.

“Nothing,” Veronica says.

“How do you expect me to believe that?”

“Nothing I want to talk to you about,” she says with finality.

Veronica is quiet in the car and holds her arms folded in front of her like a corpse. She is still breathing in strange, quick bursts, as though she has bird lungs and too much air at once would make them burst. He can’t see her face without turning toward her, so instead he watches the road, turns right at a green light. He can feel her presence next to him, as if she were the very air inside the car, though she does not say anything. He is hyperaware of her presence, even as she folds herself inward, becoming something so unassuming it hardly exists, like the space between the back of a dresser and a wall, the space beneath a chair, she focuses her energy on becoming a kind of negative space, a kind of anti-existence. He pulls through a drive through and orders her a chocolate shake.

When the cashier hands Logan his order, he holds the shake out in front of Veronica and she accepts it, wrapping both hands around the cold paper cylinder. He pops a straw out of its paper casing and shoves it into the hole for her. She stares out the window as she drinks it. He doesn’t ask her what is bothering her again, though he assumes it has to do with the asshole doctor who he thinks is probably not the doctor she usually sees.

She has finished her shake by the time they pull back into the parking spot at her apartment. Logan turns the car off and goes around, but Veronica already has the door open and is letting her body stumble out of it, nearly, but not quite missing the step down this time. He takes the empty cup from her hand and sets it back in the car’s cup holder. He will get rid of it later. She makes fists and holds them at her sides. He goes to grab for her wrists but she shrinks away.

“Come on Veronica,” he says. “Let’s just get inside.”

He tries again, this time to hold her by the shoulders, to lead her out of the parking lot and into the apartment, by she ducks away from him, and it makes him question if he had the whole story straight from the beginning, about the man and the camera, because it is the same way she acted the night before, shaking loose from physical contact, folding into her body like she was afraid of being touched. He wonders if maybe, he hit her more than once, if she has been hiding bruises, wincing with pain when he tries to help.

As a kid, he had trouble letting people touch him. He used to flinch or get so afraid in anticipation that the touch would almost hurt, even if it was gentle. There was no difference for him between a good touch and a bad one. Textbook case, he thinks now. He wonders if people just ignored it because of who his father was. It wasn’t until they moved to Neptune, leaving Aaron in L.A. for weeks at a time to film, that he was able to teach himself to act like a normal kid, to hide it, even from the people who knew him best.

He looks toward the ocean and finds he can see Dog Beach from here, across the road and through a parking lot. He realizes that when he saw her last night, she wasn’t running to the water, but running home. She almost made it.

In the parking lot, he feels the afternoon sun on his forearms, a prickle of sweat starting to form on his skin. Veronica is looking at the ground or maybe at her hands.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says to Veronica in a muted voice, as though she is a frightened dog he is trying to convince to trust him.

She looks at him and exhales. “Sorry,” she says, her cheeks pink with embarrassment.

He extends his arm and this time, she grasps on to it, and he leads her toward her front door.

She unlocks it and the dog comes bounding out, wagging his tail, running in circles around them, whining. “Can we take him?” she asks, holding onto the railing.

“How about I take him? Do you want to sit here to wait or do you want to go inside?” He doesn’t think he could support Veronica and hold the leash at the same time.

“I’ll just wait here,” she says and sits down on the steps.

Backup licks her chin and she kisses him on the top of his head, in a way that makes Logan think of his mother. Back when he was a child, his mother used to lift him into her arms with the same amount of care. He used to run straight for her after school, both of them savoring just how much they missed each other during the day. Maybe it is always like that with kids. He doesn’t remember when he stopped missing her like that, with everything in him, and he wonders if it was when he started to realize just how much she enabled his father, when he started to hate parts of her for not being stronger, for always letting his father win. Veronica scoots her body over into a shaded spot. She smiles as they go, but it is not a smile that reaches her whole face. She touches her bruise again, as if to be sure it is still there.

Logan grabs Backup’s leash and walks the dog to the grass again. He looks back at Veronica to see if she is watching them, but she is staring ahead and clutching her arms across her chest. Her hair falls in front of her eyes, but she doesn’t move it. Somehow, sitting on the stairs in the shade, she looks a thousand miles away, and even seeing her face like that feels like an invasion of privacy. He knows then that he doesn’t know her at all anymore. He redirects his attention to the dog, who promptly scrunches himself up and shits in the grass.

When Logan comes back up the stairs, Veronica lifts herself using the railing and makes her way back into the apartment. He helps her to the couch, where she sits and leans her head back against the cushions.

He sits down across from her in the recliner chair and looks her in the eyes. They still have the same look to them, downcast, but open.

“So, are you going to explain what happened back there?” he asks.

Veronica reaches down to pet Backup, who lays his head on her knees.

“I just wanted the doctor to look at my head. I didn’t want to change. I didn’t want a full examination,” she explains. She does not meet Logan’s eyes, instead staring at her dog.

“Why not?”

She shakes her head, her bangs falling into her eyes, making shadows on her face.

“Did that guy hurt you somewhere else?” Logan asks quietly, as if the question on its own were some kind of secret. He doesn’t look at her when he says it, but straight ahead, at a framed picture of Veronica holding a baseball bat, wearing a purple uniform, standing on home plate. The sun is high in the sky, bathing child Veronica in thin, white rays.

She exhales audibly. She looks at her hands for a beat. Then she lifts her shirt a few inches, showing the damaged skin alongside her stomach, before pulling the shirt down again, as though hiding the bruise beneath clothing would make it less real. It is a tactic Logan knows well. Even with the brief glance, he can tell it is the same bruised fruit color as the wound on her head.

“Fuck,” Logan says, though it is more air than voice.

Already, he can feel something boiling inside him, anger at Veronica for not telling him, at whoever did this to her, but at something else too that he can’t understand: inexplicably, he wants to show her the cigarette burns on his back from his childhood, the barely healed scabs that keep catching on his t-shirt, the thin lines of long-ago scars, and somehow he wants to hold her and tell her over and over that it will be okay. What the fuck?

“It doesn't really hurt,” she says, though he knows from experience she has to be lying, that it must hurt to breath too hard, to move anything except extremities, to stretch, to sleep, to fuck, to sit unmoving in front of the television set while apologies sail past him like little boats with no destination, to lie in bed staring at the ceiling thinking again of what he should have done differently as he waits for his body to heal itself. That it will hurt for weeks, until it will come to feel distant and distorted like a bad dream, like none of it happened at all.

“Where else?” he demands, surprising himself with the tone of his voice, the volume, too. Backup begins to growl low in his throat and Veronica places a hand on his head to calm him.

She stares at Logan hard, studying him, as though she can see through all of it, his frustration, his understanding, his rage. Then, as slowly and as calmly as she might slip out of a jacket, she moves her arm so that it hovers over her left shoulder, her left thigh, her back; and he can picture her on the tarmac of the parking lot of the Camelot Motel: caught off guard with the first hit, doubled over and curled into herself with the second as she tried to protect her body from his fists and his shoes, protect her already bleeding head from the fury of a madman, and as she gave up, holding herself very still as if just waiting for it to be over.

"Who the fuck was this guy?" he asks, unable to control his anger.

“Someone who doesn’t want his wife to win the divorce settlement,” she says calmly. It is as though the more upset Logan gets, the calmer Veronica appears, like his anger smothers hers.  
“But you know who he is. Why don’t you report it to the sheriff?”

He doesn’t understand at all the wet laugh that escapes her, like the cackling of a hyena hovering over the body of its prey, or the cold look that follows the laugh, settling over her face with whatever she is thinking of. This is the same face she wears to school, distant and unreachable, like a mask. He makes himself remember it, like he would a secret, buried beneath her black boots and military jackets and the way she has tried to scare people away, people who didn’t care about Logan’s vendetta, people like Meg and Yolanda, people who would have stayed her friends. Something happened to her. Something the sheriff knew about, but that Logan doesn’t. Something that made her her own brand of dangerous, something that necessitated the taser she carries in her bag, the image she has made for herself, the mistrust she can’t let go of, even as he is trying to help her.

“Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you tell me?” His words come out almost as a whisper and he leans closer, maybe to smooth her hair back, or to reach for her hand, but she jerks her body out of his reach.

“It isn’t as bad as it looks,” she says, and then, maybe in reaction to the face he is making, “It isn’t really your business. You don’t get to feel righteous indignation over this, when all of last year, you were leading the attack.”

“But I never—” he starts. “No one would have—”

“What? Hurt me?” She laughs bitterly, shaking her head again. She makes a face that shouldn’t belong to her, etched around the eyes with hatred, with hurt, with something like loneliness, and he doesn’t think there is anything he could say to make any of it better.

Logan feels sunken and weighed-down, as though held underwater by a heavy metal anchor, and all of the fight goes out of him. He catches his head in his hands and rubs his eyes with his index fingers. He runs his hands through his hair as though his fingers form a sieve, draining away the parts of himself that he’s been trying his whole life to taper down: the hurt, the weakness that raises in him impulses he doesn’t try hard enough to control; the fear that lives deep in his gut that he, too, is a monster like his father; the way he lashes out, like a child, picking even fights he can’t win; the way he always chooses girls who cheat on him, as though he doesn’t deserve anything else; the way he wades through the world in his father’s shadow and no matter how hard he tries, he can’t escape it. Logan presses the tip of his tongue between his teeth, as if to stop himself from saying something he’ll regret, but the truth is, he doesn’t know what to say.

Veronica speaks again and he gets the sense that she is backtracking. “I can handle this. It will hurt until it doesn’t hurt anymore. It’s already over.” Her words are calm again, solid like little stones. But there is something unspoken too, some other hurt that lasts, some other hurt that is ultimately his fault. He can’t leave it there.

“I’m sorry,” he says finally, looking at her while fighting the urge to look away; her eyes are so blue, like clear water. “For last year. I’m really sorry. I’m a huge asshole.”

Veronica’s eyes quickly dart away from his, settling somewhere else behind him. She kind of nods, but that look is back on her face, not angry, but sad maybe, or vulnerable in a way he isn’t used to seeing. He is kind of glad when she doesn’t just shrug off his apology, or tell him it’s okay.

Instead, she just closes her eyes.

“How about a movie?” he asks. “I could go get something and after, we could order something to eat.”

“Okay,” she says, noncommittally. Her eyes are still closed.


	3. Chapter 3

 

  
Logan comes back from Blockbuster with a stack of DVDs in his arms. He sets the pile of plastic cases out on the coffee table and Veronica sits up to sort through them. She spreads them out in front of her like a winning poker hand, as though their earlier conversation never happened at all, like a movie itself, like something that happened to other people. She does not make eye contact. Not even when he opened the door, looking instead somewhere past him.

“Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” Veronica reads with a laugh to her voice that doesn’t quite go with her features. “I bet we could still quote most of that movie.”

“I got a bunch that we used to like,” Logan explains. “Donnie Darko, Kill Bill, Remember the Titans. I wasn’t sure what you were in the mood for.” He doesn’t remember the rest.

He watches the top of her head from across the room as she turns the stack into two piles. Finally, she opens one of the cases, slides the disk onto her index finger, and raises it into the air as though it were a kind of trophy.

“I think I’m feeling Remember the Titans, surprisingly,” she says and holds the DVD in his direction.

Logan laughs. He feeds the disk to the DVD player and presses play when the menu screen comes up.

Veronica makes room for him on the couch so they can both see the TV. Since the night before, the love seat has taken on a kind of lived-in quality, like a den or a cave, like an unmade bed. Logan can feel Veronica’s warmth on the blankets as she hastily rolls them into a pile against the armrest.

“We used to watch this all the time,” she says. She is sitting at his side. When she turns her head to speak, it is as though her words are nothing more than vapor and vibration, meaning secondary to their sounds, dressed up in nostalgia.

“Only because Lilly had a crush on that blond guy,” Logan says and laughs, remembering how Lilly paused the locker room scene until Duncan finally hit play and took the batteries out of the remote.

Logan leans back into the couch, making a space for himself among the cushions. Their legs are not touching, but they are close enough that he can still feel warmth from hers.

Veronica laughs too, still moving to defend it. “Hey, it’s a good movie,” she says. “Besides, you were the one who rented it.”

“Only because you used to like it.”

“It’s inspirational,” Veronica says defensively.

“And it has Ryan Gosling before he was in The Notebook,” Logan adds. “You’re a girl. You probably like him.”

“I actually didn’t see The Notebook, but apparently you did.” He can hear the smirk in her voice without even looking at her.  
  
“I slept through most of it. It was depressing as hell,” he says.

He remembers how he got dragged along in a group to go see it, months after Lilly died, and had to sneakily wipe his eyes in the dark theatre, before the house lights came on at the end of the movie, how he thought of Lilly, as though they would have had a chance to end up back together if she were still alive. He was always drawn to Lilly’s magnetism, the way every moment with her seemed like an escape from his real life. She was just so much that everything else seemed small in comparison. He wonders if what people call love is really just that feeling of escape.

“Isn’t it a romance?” she asks.

"Between old people," he explains. “They die at the end.”

“Hey, spoiler alert!” she says and hits him on the shoulder.

“I just spared you from it. You were never going to watch that movie. Too unrealistic and sappy. Ryan Gosling spends like forever building a house for Rachel McAdams so she’ll leave this other guy for him after they haven’t spoken in 5 years. It’s ridiculous.”

“Who knows? Maybe I would have have watched it some day,” she says.

As the movie starts, Veronica pulls the blanket up to her chin, wrapping herself up in it. She leans back on the cushions, wincing a bit until she gets more comfortable. She tries to hide her discomfort, but he can read it on her face.

"Okay?” he asks her.

“Fine,” she says and then softens. “It’s just hard to get comfortable.”

He knows the feeling. Sometimes, laying on his stomach or standing in his bedroom shirtless is the only way he can feel comfortable after Aaron’s punishments.

“Yeah,” Logan says, smiling feebly in her direction. “Do you want me to move?”

“No,” she says. “I’m fine.”

"Why don't you lay on your side?” he asks. “I mean, the one that isn’t bruised. We could switch sides if you want.”

She shifts her body into a seated position and Logan tries not to notice that she must have taken her bra off while he was at the video store, the cotton fabric of her t-shirt thin with wear. He looks straight ahead at the television, hoping she didn’t catch him staring. He risks a look back at her face, and he can tell immediately that she saw him. A blush lines her cheeks. He doesn't know if he should say anything, if acknowledging it would make it better or worse.

“Whatever’s comfortable,” he says. “I don’t care.”

“It’s only comfortable if you don’t look,” she says and hits him with a throw pillow.

Then she inhales sharply and he turns to look at her struggling uncomfortably against the cushions. He can see frustration line her face.

“Why don’t you lay on a pillow? Or on your back?” Logan suggests.

“I want to still be able to actually see the TV,” she says.

He gets up from the couch. He holds out the throw pillow she threw at him as though it were some kind of truce.

“Here,” he says. “Lay over here.” He directs her to reposition herself against the armrest like she was before. She takes the pillow from him, laying her head against it. He wonders how she is going to survive the uncomfortable desks at Neptune High on Monday.

“Better?” Logan asks.

“Yeah,” she says, looking up at him. “But where are you going to sit?”

He moves to the other side of the couch and lifts her feet up slowly. She is wearing green striped socks gone gray at the bottoms with over washing. He slides in underneath her feet and lowers them down on his lap. He squeezes her toes, cocking his eyebrow at her, and she twitches her foot out of his hand. She flings the blanket over her and Logan rests his own feet on the coffee table.

After a while, she gets up to go to the bathroom and when she comes back, she sits down next to Logan, her feet next to his on the coffee table, their arms touching. She shoves a pillow behind her. He can tell she put her bra back on, though he tries not to notice.

They keep up a running commentary throughout the movie. She quotes the end of Coach Boone’s cemetery speech.

“See?” she says, “I feel better just hearing that.”

When the Titans win the semi-finals, he knows Veronica has fallen asleep because her breathing has turned even and she has started to slump towards him, her neck at an awkward angle. He moves imperceptibly closer and tries to focus on the movie. Then, just as the players go out to celebrate, she shifts in sleep so that her head rests against his collarbone. Her skin is warm and smooth against his, her breath warm on his neck. He can feel the wire of her bra against his arm, and beyond it, the soft curve of her. It is as though every part of his body touching hers is all nerve-endings.

Outside, the sun shines through the blinds on the front door and despite the closed windows, he can hear kids shouting in the pool. He is hyperaware of the location of each of her injuries as though they were his own. He angles his head slowly to look at her bandage, to make sure he isn't touching it in any way. Satisfied, he turns back, ignoring the crick in his neck, and inhales the skin smell of her, her floral shampoo, with a hint of sweat. He feels safe in a way he doesn’t want to think about.

He lets the movie play, though he has a hard time following it.

Even when they were friends, the four of them, he never sat like this with her. Lilly always draped herself on him, crossing boundaries before he knew they were there, while Veronica sat next to Duncan, the both of them perfectly still, hands on their laps. There was never any innocence to Lilly, not even when they were young; she was always touching, exploring new territory, cataloging Logan’s responses if she put her hands here or her mouth there, figuring him out, gaining knowledge that he thinks she probably spent on other people, too, though he tried not to think about it at the time; it was like—if he could just keep part of her for himself, that was all he needed.

Veronica is different. There is no calculation in the way she sleeps with her mouth open against his neck, in the way her hands hang down, one settling against his stomach, the other bent against his hip. He can only see these pieces of her when her guard is down. It’s the only time she would let anyone get this close.

After a few more minutes, he closes his eyes, too.

He wakes to a sharp knock on the door and sits up, cracking his neck as he straightens it. He looks down at Veronica as she shifts back into her own spot. She wakes more slowly, stretching her arms and legs out in front of her like a cat. Does she realize that she fell asleep against him? He isn’t sure. He still feels the calming warmth of her against his skin.

Whoever is at the door knocks again. Backup trots over and sits down, wagging his tail against the tile floor.

“Expecting anyone?” Logan asks, folding the blanket back onto Veronica. “Should I answer it?” A man-shaped shadow is visible beyond the light-colored blinds.

Veronica shrugs and tries to get up.

"I'll get it," Logan says. She doesn’t fight him and just curls herself back into the couch, yawning.

The knocking sounds again and Logan stands up and moves the blinds out of the way. Veronica is still laying on the couch under the blanket.

“Veronica, do you know this guy? He’s wearing a suit and holding two bags of food from Luigi’s.” He thinks the food is a good sign, but the man isn’t dressed like a delivery man.

“Oh yeah, that’s Cliff. You can let him in,” she says. Logan releases the chain, turns the deadbolt, and opens the door so that it creaks open. The man gives him a smile that shows crooked teeth.

"Hi,” Logan says and Cliff passes through the open door, stopping to wipe his feet on the floor mat.

“You must be Veronica’s friend,” the man says to Logan and holds out the greasy paper bags like an offering.

Logan moves to take them. The man pulls out a bouquet of flowers from under his arm. Then he looks into the living room at Veronica and gives a little wave with the flowers. He says, “Hope you’ve been taking care of yourself, V.”

“Thanks, Cliff,” she says.

Logan places the bags down on the table, the grease on the bottom of them making his hands wet. Cliff reaches down to pet the dog, who curves his body and presses it against the man’s leg, like he is someone familiar. Backup’s tail wags hard against the cabinet like a fleshy rope, thumping rhythmically.

“What’s your name again?” Cliff asks.

"Logan,” he says.

“Right. Mine’s Cliff McCormack,” he says and offers Logan a similarly greasy hand in a quick, tight handshake. “If you ever find yourself in the need of legal counsel,” he says and withdraws a business card from his front jacket pocket with what appears to be an oft-practiced flourish.

Logan takes the card and looks at it. Clifford McCormack, public defender, it says. The design is simple and has a little brown graphic of a briefcase in the corner.

“Really selling it, Cliffy,” Veronica says and repositions herself on the couch. “But I’m sure his family has their own lawyer. Or a team of them, even.” Logan is grateful when she stops there without uttering his father’s name.

“Well, doesn’t hurt to try,” Cliff says with an exaggerated wink.

Logan pockets the card, more to look accommodating than anything else. “Thanks.”

Cliff approaches Veronica in the living room and bends over to examine her head. He hands her the flowers, which she smells theatrically and sets down on the coffee table.

“Thanks,” she tells him.

“Keith sent me to check on you. That’s a nasty bruise you got there, Veronica. I hope I’m not intruding on anything.”

“Just Remember the Titans,” Veronica says. Behind her, on the TV, the team is getting ready to start the state finals. Their teammate Gerry is watching the game on the TV in his hospital room. Logan walks over to the coffee table and presses pause on the remote.

“Well, I’ll get out of your hair. Just came to drop this off. I know you like this place. But your dad told me to get you something healthy, so here,” Cliff says and takes out a plastic container of salad from one of the bags and places it on the table.

Veronica laughs from the couch.

“Take care of yourself, kid, and you didn’t hear it from me, but a shot of whiskey always does the trick,” he says and Veronica shakes her head, a puff of air escaping from her lips.

Cliff winks dramatically at Logan before he leaves though the front door.

Logan turns the deadbolt into place behind him and slides the chain back into place.

“Friend of your dad’s?” he asks.

“Yeah. Colleague, kind of. They throw business each other’s way every so often,” Veronica explains. She sits forward, looking toward the kitchen table.

“Cool,” Logan says. “Hungry?”

Veronica pulls herself up from the couch and walks in slow steps to the kitchen table. Logan peers inside the bags and releases the scent of tomato sauce, oregano, and copious amounts of cheese. He begins taking the foil containers out and setting them on the table. By now, he knows where the silverware and the plates are, so he opens the cabinets and drawers. The silverware is running low, most of it buried beneath a mess of plates and bowls in the sink. They’re all filled with now-cold water and the residue left behind by old soap. Since Friday, he has added so much to the pile that it continues to grow on the counter next to the sink. He doesn’t understand how Veronica had to immediately clean the bathroom, but can spend probably the greater part of a week ignoring the dishes in the sink. By the time he sits back down, Veronica has made her way to the table, the dog sitting as tall as he can make himself at her side.

“I think it’s getting better,” she says. “I don’t feel as dizzy.”

“That’s good,” Logan says as he sets a plate in front of her. “Maybe all you needed was rest.”

Veronica pops the lids off the foil containers, revealing mostaccioli with meatballs, chicken vesuvio, and garlic bread. Logan is glad to see she eats more than she did that morning, without the pauses made by nausea. He leaves most of the pasta for Veronica, but takes half of the chicken and some of the salad. He doesn’t like the way he feels getting full on pasta. It’s a heavy, garlicky kind of full that he never liked.

When they finish eating, Logan collects the empty containers and places them in the garbage.

"How are you feeling now?” he asks Veronica.

“Okay,” she says. “My headache is gone. It’s just when I move the wrong way or forget and touch it on accident.”

He nods.

“What time is it?” Veronica says aloud. “I was supposed to call Wallace today.”

“6:30.”.

“Shoot,” she says, shuffling to the coffee table for her phone and then taking it into her bedroom.

This prompts Logan to check his own phone, only to see two missed calls from Dick, and one from Duncan. He should have called Dick back earlier.

He sits down on the couch and calls Dick back first. He answers on the third ring.

"Hey man," Logan says.

“Where have you been?” Dick asks, “Way to bail on surfing this morning.”

Logan bailing on surfing isn’t that far out of the realm of possibility, especially if Dick really believed that he was hooking up with someone last night.

“I had to go to the dentist,” Logan lies easily, thanking his mother. He sits down into Veronica’s spot on the couch. Backup comes to lie next to him and Logan pets his head.

“Lame,” Dick says. “We’re going down to Madison’s. Her parents are out of town, so we’re all going to crash there. You in?”

“I don’t think so,” Logan says. “I’m busy.” He watches Veronica’s bedroom door, but it stays closed.

“Well you could stay home jerking it or you could come to Madison’s. Come on man, get your dick out of your hand and get over here.”

"Bye, Dick,” Logan says and hangs up, sliding the phone back into his pocket.

He calls Duncan back next, but he doesn’t answer and the call goes to voicemail. Logan doesn’t leave a message. He figures Duncan, too, is getting ready for Madison’s party, while dreading it at the same time. Duncan is usually his excuse to leave early, to crash in one of the Kane’s guest rooms.

Veronica comes back into the room, taking small steps without lifting her feet fully from the carpet. The evening sunlight bathes the apartment temporarily in a warm orange glow.

  
“Do you want to go for a walk?” Veronica asks.

At her words, Backup immediately jumps from his spot on the couch and runs to the front door, where he chases his tail excitedly, as though this were the mechanism by which the door opened.

“Looks like somebody does. But are you sure you can walk?” Logan asks.

“I need to get out of the apartment. I feel stir crazy. Even if we just walk to the water. Besides, Backup has been cooped up all day, too.” She is already heading for the kitchen and reaching for the dog’s leash. The dog, too, stands to attention at her side.

"If you’re sure,” Logan says and follows behind her to the door, slipping back into his shoes.

Outside the apartment, he feels suddenly self-conscious, like he is afraid to stand too close. He holds the dog’s leash. Veronica is wearing a hoodie pulled up around her head to hide her bruise. The walk from the apartment building to the beach takes them ten minutes. Veronica’s gait appears more normal outside, free of furniture obstacles to twist around, but still, she walks slowly, every so often pulling the muscles in her body taut as if in response to an accidental jarring.

At the beach, Veronica unhooks Backup’s leash and throws a stick for him.

“Ow,” she says when she raises her arm above her head. The stick falls to the ground close by, but the dog runs for it anyway, just as excited as he would be were the stick thrown farther.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. I just keep forgetting.”

“Yeah,” Logan says, understanding completely. It’s hard to teach yourself your body’s new and temporary limitations. Most of the human body’s motions are muscle-memory, engrained over years of repetition, automatic. “Maybe you should take something, or use ice.”

“I think it’s too late for ice,” she says. “But at least I have a get out of gym free card.”

Backup runs back and drops the stick at Veronica’s feet, his tongue dangling out of his mouth.

“You should use heat tomorrow. Do you have a heating pad?”

“Somewhere,” she says. “I’ll find it later.”

Logan picks up the stick from the sand and under-hands it about ten feet to their left.

In front of them, a group of college students dig up a cooler plastered with UCLA stickers that they must have buried in the sand to keep out of the sun. They sit down on their crumpled towels and pass around a bottle opener and the girls laugh as their bikini tops make wet circles on their sweatshirts.

“Do you think you could take me to pick up my car tomorrow?” Veronica asks. She holds the leash in her hands, coiled into a large O. She clicks and un-clicks the metal latch that normally connects it to the dog’s collar.

“Of course,” Logan says. “No problem.”

Logan throws the stick for him, just short of the water. Veronica laughs as the dog takes off, jumping clear over a sandcastle in pursuit of the stick.

“He takes fetch seriously,” she says.

“I can see that.”

"Just don’t throw it in the water. He would get it, but then we’ll have to clean him.”

“Noted,” Logan says.

Backup brings the stick to Logan and drops it at his feet. He stares at Logan expectantly until he throws it again.

In the silence that follows, Logan listens to the waves, that quiet rush breaking open, scattering water like little crystals over the sand. The last sunlight settles on the surf and creates a shimmering kaleidoscope on the edge of the water.

“This is weird,” she says suddenly.

Logan watches the dog run after the stick, stopping to sniff at a pile of seaweed.

"What’s weird?" he asks her, though he feels it too: the odd sense of calm that has fallen between them, two teenagers standing on a darkening beach, after the end of everything. He doesn’t know what comes next, but it is big, like a rainstorm, like a shift in the universe; he just feels it in the air around them, heavy as humidity, sharp as static.

“Being here with you. I just don’t understand why you’re being so nice to me.”

It takes Logan a minute to form in words the reason that has been drifting around in his head since he picked her up on the beach the night before. She isn’t looking at him, but ahead at the dog or maybe the ocean or the people drinking beer. He watches her for a moment, notes the dreamy sort of defiance she carries in her face that takes over when she needs it to, skeptical almost, of the whole day, like it were someone else’s daydream.

“I guess I don’t want to fight anymore,” Logan says.

Veronica crouches down on the uneven sand to retrieve the stick from the dog. She passes it to Logan to throw again. The stick is now missing most of its bark, gnawed off by expert teeth in short strips.

“All right,” she says, as though it were always that simple.

The sun has become a ripe cherry on the horizon; light and shadow cascade over the beach. A couple walks through the sand in front of them hand in hand and Logan has to wait until they pass to throw the stick for Backup again.

“Do you believe me?” he asks her. He wants her to look at him, to recognize honesty and apology in his face, but she doesn’t. He looks instead at the stick in his hand and throws it as far as he can down the beach.

“I think I’m starting to,” she says.

This time, as soon as the stick leaves Logan’s hand, Backup loses interest in it and drops his body down at their feet. Veronica reaches down the pat the rolls of skin on his back and hook the leash to him again. “It’s getting dark. We should head back.”

He wants to hold her arm as she struggles to navigate the choppy sand back to the parking lot, but he can’t make himself grab for it. Instead, he holds the end of the leash for her so that the dog doesn’t pull her too hard and make her lose her balance. By the time they reach the apartment, the lights over the parking lot have come on and the people playing in the pool have gone back inside. A pizza delivery man stands outside one of the apartments and presses the buzzer, whose sound they can hear through the open window. A woman carries a basket full of laundry down one of the flights of stairs. Veronica waves to her and the woman nods back.

He tries to picture Veronica in her pink bathing suit from last year, sitting in one of these deck chairs with a book or swimming laps around the pool, directing her body around those of little kids with plastic pool toys and floating squirt guns. She probably knows all of their names, or at least their faces and who they belong to. But it’s harder to see with this new Veronica.

“Do you ever swim here?” Logan asks, gesturing to the pool lamely.

The pool-side lights are on, dimly highlighting the cement path around the water. Logan and Veronica step over puddles made earlier when the sun was out, while Backup sloshes through them, leaving a few sets of paw prints in his wake.

“Sometimes,” Veronica says. “But not really.”

She grabs the dog’s feet and wipes them gently on the mat outside the door. Logan wipes his feet too, sends sand scattering off into the tan bristles. He notices that the welcome mat says Wipe Your Paws and has a picture of two muddy paw prints. Veronica unlocks the door and lets the dog proceed them into the apartment.

In the apartment again, she holds her shoes out the door and shakes the sand from them. She uses a towel on the dog’s feet and fur. Veronica locks the door behind them. Then they head back to the couch and Logan flops down on the end. Veronica eases herself into a seated position, careful not to make any physical contact between them, though the obviousness with which she avoids it a clue Logan files away.

“Do you want to finish the movie?” he asks.

“I don’t know. I don’t want to see Gerry die. Maybe if we just stop watching when they win, that way they all just stay alive.”

He looks at her with a smirk. “Okay,” he says.

There is a point during the end of the movie where it starts to feel like an awkward first date, the exaggerated space between them on the couch, the way they hold themselves rigid, like soldiers under inspection, keeping their hands folded on their laps.

He doesn’t know how to say it, but he needs to be closer, even if it is just their feet under the blanket pressing against each other. He reaches for the blanket on the couch and pulls it over himself. He holds it out to her and after a moment, she pulls a corner up to her chin. He uses this an excuse to reposition himself closer. His thigh grazes hers under the blanket and feels ten degrees warmer than the rest of him. He exhales and lets himself sink into the feeling of touching her. Her hands are above the blanket, hanging loosely at her sides, his too, only inches apart. He keeps daring himself to lay his hand closer. How can he do it and make it seem like an accident? He moves his hand to his own leg, where it rests just above the knee. Above the blanket, it looks like a spy, like she will see right through him. He reaches the end of where it would be acceptable to rest his hand and hopes that she will just move hers over, the smallest amount, so that the sides of their pinky fingers would press together. But she doesn’t move her hand at all and instead stays transfixed on the movie, as though she doesn’t notice or isn't charged by their proximity like Logan is. He can’t think of anything else except excuses to shift himself in her direction. He could feign sleep and lean toward her, but risk hurting her injuries. She could fall asleep again and lay against him so close that he could feel her heartbeat against his chest. He feels stupid, like a kid, like someone inexperienced, but he can’t make himself do anything else. Something about this Veronica eviscerates him. He doesn’t want to do anything to upset her, to harm the careful truce they have settled between them. He doesn’t want any reason for her to push him away and make him go back home where he will lie in his bed thinking of her alone with the dog, in her empty apartment on the bad side of town.

When the Titans win the state championship game, Logan gets up to find the remote and stop the movie. Veronica yawns next to him, stretching the unbruised arm over her head.

“I’m going to change into pajamas,” she says and disappears into her room.

Logan didn't think to bring something to sleep in, an oversight that means he will have to spend another night in cargo shorts.

He imagines her, struggling to pull her sweater over her head, wincing in pain as she lets the articles of clothing clutter her floor, staring in disbelief at herself in the mirror as she learns how bruises morph over time, from grape to cranberry to burnt oil to jaundice and back again. He wants to tell her, but he knows that he won’t be able to. He can’t make himself hold the memories of it for long, let alone convert them into words for another person. It took all he had as a kid to talk to his mother about it, his sister, even, but nothing ever happened to change anything, not until he was old enough to just leave the house, to become a shadow in his father’s life and a permanent fixture at the Kane’s, the Casablanca’s, the Enbaum’s, a model guest with stories of celebrities, the kind that only make them laugh or make them jealous. He doesn’t tell the stories that end with Logan drunk too young by himself in the bathroom vomiting while his parents entertain, or the ones with Logan messing up the punchline of one of his father’s stories with an ill-timed comment or yawn, that end with him on the floor in his father’s office hours later, paying for it.

She comes back and sits on the couch next to him, not as close as they were just sitting, and not as close as they used to sit when it was the four of them, squishing into each other’s personal space, as if that too were something to be shared.

They both fall asleep on the couch, their feet touching on the coffee table. With the blankets and her body heat, Logan is too warm. He shifts one of his legs out of the blanket, letting a draft enter. He shifts, scratching one of his scabs against his t-shirt, and hisses in the darkness mostly with the surprise of it. He looks over at Veronica, but she is still asleep, her face pressed away from him into the armrest, her hair askew, held vertical against the couch cushion with static.

Asleep, it all makes more sense. Asleep, he can undo the past year; hell, he can undo anything. His mind can create whatever reality it wants to. It is how he really knows there is something – he dreams it, asleep across from her on the couch, his body crumpled into an uncomfortable position that seems comfortable to him because it is near her, and when he realizes, all he can think is shit, shit, shit.

He wants to know what will happen on Monday when he sees her in the hallway, when everyone is talking about the big white bandage across her head, spreading more false rumors about her. Will he be able to walk past her as though nothing has changed? As though this weekend didn’t happen?

He can hear the sound of her breathing in the dark, not quite snoring, but almost.

He feels as though he is the one who owes her something, although he is the one who took care of her all weekend.

He is about to fall asleep again when he feels movement on her side of the couch, only to realize she is thrashing from side to side like a dog on a short leash, desperate to get out of someone’s grip. The first thing he thinks is that it could be a seizure, but he stands and touches one of her shoulders and she wakes immediately, bolting forward, breathing fast, as though waking from a dream of running.

“Veronica,” Logan says and withdraws his hand.

“It was just a nightmare,” she says, her voice quiet as a whisper, but low, as though it isn’t meant for him. She leans back into the couch and takes a few deep breaths.

“Of Lilly?” he asks and sits back down on the couch.

In the darkness, the TV across from them reflects their dark shapes on its empty screen. He watches Veronica’s shadowy reflection tense and pull her knees to her chest and a blanket over them.

“Not Lilly,” she says and carefully winds her short hair behind her ear, dodging the bandage and the bruise.

“The guy with the camera?”

He doesn’t know who he is sparing the violence of a direct mention. Why is it that when people talk about terrible things, they talk around them, only alluding to them with signifiers? Lilly instead of Lilly, covered in blood, already dead. The guy with the camera instead of the guy who beat you in a parking lot with your camera. It is as though alluding to the events this way, he can take away the trauma of them, that they can talk about them without talking about them.

“No,” Veronica says, hardly voicing the word at all. It sounds almost like a breath.

“Something else?” he asks and turns to look at her.

Veronica nods and tilts her head down, as if hiding, as if in prayer.

“What happened?”

She shakes her head and is silent again, except for her breath which is still heaving. She seems to weigh something before she answers.

"Don’t you know?” she asks, her voice suddenly mean.

“What are you talking about, Veronica?” Logan folds his arms across his chest.

She doesn’t say anything, but looks up at his face as though trying to read it in the half-light that comes in filtered though the blinds from the lights in the parking lot.

“Did someone else hurt you?” he asks.

He tries to rake his mind for any memory of something someone did to her, but he never heard anything other than the rumors, never did anything other than ignore her and cast her out, other than make her feel unwelcome. He wonders if it could be this, their cruelty, that hurt her, that made her turn her back on who she used to be.

She holds herself absolutely still. Though she doesn’t answer, her non-answer tells him what he needs to know.   
  
“Who?” he says.

“I don’t know,” she says. She takes a deep breath and lets it rattle slowly out of her. She pulls her hands out from underneath the blanket they are still sharing. She winds them together on her lap. “You never heard?” she asks as though she didn’t believe him the first time.

“Heard what?” he asks. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

She makes a sound in her throat that is kind of like a sob, or maybe saliva stuck there that she is trying to swallow.

“Someone raped me at Shelley’s party last year,” she says without looking at Logan. The way her voice sounds as she recounts it, nonchalant, angry, stays with him, even after she is quiet again.

“What?” he says, though he heard her words, as clear, unashamed, unapologetic as they were terrible.

“The ‘09ers weren’t bragging about it?” she says sarcastically.

“No,” he says. Then, “Oh my god, Veronica.” He tries to reach for her, but she inches away. He holds his hand out, daring hers to grab it, but she doesn’t, as though the time she needed to be comforted about this is long over. But Logan needs something to ground him. His mind moves between the events he can remember and he can’t help but feel that she is watching the night play along his face: using her as a salt lick, the shots they fed her, the buzz from the GHB he had that made everything seem so far away, so unimportant, and then leaving with that girl, what was her name? That friend of Shelley’s? As though a night fumbling in the backseat of his car could make him forget about Lilly, the way people who never even knew her had seen that video of her lying there, dead.

There is guilt, too. He runs a hand through his hair as Veronica stares at him, waiting for some recognition, something he must have heard, but there is nothing; only the rumors he knew weren’t true, but that spread through the school like wildfire.

“God, Veronica. I swear I never heard anything about that.”

“So your friends only spread rumors that aren’t true,” she says with a huff to her voice, a familiar kind of strength she tries to project.

"I'm so sorry. God,” he says again. “Did you tell your dad?”

“No way,” she says. “Just our inept sheriff who told me to grow a backbone.”

The pieces fall together for Logan as he looks at her face: the abrupt change in her, the sleeping pills, the anger, directed not just at him, but at everyone at school, all accomplices of whoever actually did it.

Her eyes are wet, but she wipes them. She isn’t crying. Not really. Her bandage looks like a grotesque shadow in the darkness of her living room. Her hands have calmed their frantic wringing and her breathing slows to normal, as though telling him had released something in her.

"I won't tell," he says.

“I know.”

It is his turn now, to feel tense with knowledge he shouldn’t have, knowledge of something that shouldn’t have happened. Lilly would hate him. Maybe that’s a selfish thought, but Lilly would definitely hate him now if she were alive, for not protecting Veronica, for disturbing the social order Lilly set up, for creating a world where someone thought they could even touch Veronica. His self-pity makes him feel even more guilty. This isn’t about him at all. It’s about Veronica.

"I'm sorry," he says again, helplessly. She leans back into the cushion so that their shoulders touch, so that a kind of warmth flows between them.

Veronica nods.

He can feel her breathing.

“I’m so sorry,” he says again and she reaches for his hand. He squeezes her fingers and she squeezes back. She releases her grasp but leaves her hand curled around his, not so much holding it as letting it rest there. He keeps his body still, as though shifting will remind her that she left her hand in his, like some small possession she misplaced.

There is a gap, a period of near silence in the apartment, where she becomes herself again: straightens up on the couch, removes her hand from Logan’s, and tries to will him to forget everything.

“So what’s your deal?” she asks him. “Why are you really here? I heard you on the phone with your mom earlier. Why can’t you go home?”

There is a moment where he thinks she knows—that she is looking only for confirmation—but he realizes slowly that Veronica isn’t the kind of person who looks for confirmation when she knows something. She is a vulture for information. She asks because she doesn’t know.

A secret for a secret, a trade in the night they will never speak of again.

He thinks of her taking sleep aid pills, but still dreaming about that party over and over again, as if it were possible to make sense of what happened to her. He has been doing the same thing his whole life, has had years of practice in squishing everything so far down inside of himself that most of the time, he can pretend it isn’t there, can pretend he doesn’t dwell on it more than he has to, as though it is nothing but a game of survival he has been playing his whole life. Still, he sees it in himself—this identity he can’t shake, no matter how many fights he wins against guys his own size, no matter how many girls he fools around with, no matter how much he drinks, he is still that same kid who dreads going home when his dad is there; he is still his father’s victim. Veronica, more than anyone else, with her heavy boots and her short haircut and and her taser and her nightmares, would understand.

“My dad is there,” he says.

He stares at her in the dark, as though this sentence could convey all of it: the fear, the hatred, the circular burns that look like old sunburn on his back, the hospital visits where he had to make up accidents, the broken wrist, the concussion, the slices in his back made by his father’s belts healing over each other in layers, the paralyzation that comes with it, all of the things he has never really told anyone.

He knows Veronica doesn’t understand, but she doesn’t say anything. She just waits for him to explain. Her silence is what gives him the nerve to try.

He just can’t figure out the words to use so he can sound as nonchalant and unashamed as she did, as though he can hide how he feels about it behind words because all of the other stuff that comes with it is the worst part, the stuff that isn’t over when Aaron hangs up the belt.

He inhales and tries to say something, but no words come out. He sits for a minute; thinking of how to tell her without telling her, in as few words as possible. He thinks the words my dad abuses me sound too dramatic; my dad hurts me doesn’t quite capture the scope of it; and then, he can’t imagine any of those words coming out of his mouth. They all sound too weak, and Logan isn’t weak, or maybe not only weak.

When all of the words in the English language fail him, he pulls his shirt up in the back, to show her the scabs he knows are still visible, though the welts have faded, to make her witness to the topography of his transgressions. The fabric of the shirt bunches at his neck, the cool air in the apartment raising goosebumps on his exposed skin.

"Logan?" she says, his name a question on her lips, the lines on his back no more than shadows in the dark.

She turns on a lamp and it casts the room in a dim yellow glow. He hears her gasp and feels her fingertips touch his back, making each spot tingle, as though she were making ripples in a clear pond, her touch expanding outward to every part of him.

“Your dad?” she asks as she traces the line of one scar with her fingertip. “Does this?”

Logan’s throat feels like it is full of sand. Veronica moves her hand to his shoulders and his muscles relax, warmth pooling against them.

“Since I was a kid,” he says and the words feel heavy in his throat. He pulls the shirt down and turns back to Veronica, though he can’t look her in the eyes.

His body feels like lead and he is somewhere outside of it. He feels the blood rush to his face and stay there. Veronica’s living room takes on an unreal feeling, as though all of this is just some strange dream he won’t remember. But he looks up in time to see knowledge settling onto her face that he can’t take back. Years of lies to cover up his father’s mistakes. Too many days of missed school for stupid accidents. Swimming with his shirt on as though embarrassed.

“Logan,” she says. “Why?”

“He hates me.”

“Why are you telling me this?” she says.

“I don’t know. Why did you tell me about Shelley’s party?”

She leans back into the arm of the love seat and turns away from him, as though to stare at the television or the kitchen table, inanimate objects that can’t make her feel anything.

“I thought you knew, or had heard something I could use to figure out who did it,” she says.

Logan thinks of how strange anger must be when directed at a shadow of a person, at someone unknown, a body among bodies, how impotent it must feel without a target to sharpen her hatred, her fear, her regret, with no one to blame.

“I think your dad knows about my dad,” Logan says and rubs his palms together in his lap. “I think that’s why he let me stay here. I don’t know if my mom told him, maybe, when he was sheriff.”

“He never told me.”

“Well, now we’re even. A truth for a truth,” he says.

Around them, the room seems to breathe them in. Logan sits next to her on the couch but neither of them look at each other, as though afraid to see how these confessions look on each other’s faces. Logan can feel them settling like dust in the little apartment, like the calm in the aftermath of a great battle when both sides collect their dead, their wounded, united finally in a common objective. It’s like that, but not only like that. A kind of closeness, maybe. An alliance.

Veronica yawns after a while and the sound of it makes him yawn, too. He thinks they should go back to sleep, but his neck hurts from sitting upright on the couch. He angles his head to one side and the other and it rewards him for the effort with a pop of air. He thinks that in their old house they used to have a bigger sofa. He guesses it probably wouldn’t fit in this room.

He can hear Veronica’s mouth open in the dark as her lips separate from one another.

“Does is hurt?” she asks.

“Not anymore,” he answers.

He can still see their reflections, side by side, in the mirror made by the television screen, but they are featureless shadows. She touches the top of his hand with her fingertips, draws circles that tingle through his entire body.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

He yawns again. Veronica withdraws her hand and leans then to her side of the couch, with her feet still on the coffee table in front of them. He moves too, makes himself comfortable, lets his feet press against hers.

Eventually, they fall into the silence that precedes sleep: the refrigerator hums without a tune, a television makes far-off conversation they can only hear the noise of, floors creak as paths are carved out between bedrooms and bathrooms, living rooms and kitchens, and their breaths become drawn out. It all becomes a kind of silence. As he lays on the arm of the love seat, in the seconds before he falls asleep, Logan listens to Veronica’s breathing. It is the only sound he is aware of in the room, as if everything else were on mute. Her knees and feet touch his on the couch as she sleeps sitting upright.

Sometime during the night, hours later, she shifts in sleep so that the curve of her spine is pressed against him, both of their bodies folded up like origami cranes on the too-small love seat. He doesn’t wake, but relaxes further into himself, feeling the warm press of her body against his like a memory from a lifetime ago.

When she wakes, hours later, and returns to her own bed, he wakes only with the absence of her, the sudden cold at his side. He stretches out in the warm place her body lay minutes ago and falls asleep again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I still have approx. 10 pages left that I need to revise, but this felt like a good chapter break. Thanks for reading!


	4. Chapter 4

 

 

The next morning, Logan wakes from a dream of falling into the mid-morning light of the Mars’ living room. He hears the coffee machine sputtering in the kitchen, the snuffle-like snores of Backup nearby, the rhythmic clicking of someone’s fingers against a keyboard. He blinks, rubs his eyes and finds himself lying on his back, his too-long legs hanging uncomfortably off the side of the love seat.

When he turns toward the sound of typing, Logan sees Veronica at the kitchen table with her laptop, already dressed and chewing on a piece of toast. On the counter, a big tub of Folgers coffee sits open, dry grounds scattered around it while two identical mugs wait for the machine to finish. He sits up, stretching, and she nods to him.

“Morning,” Veronica says.

“Morning,” Logan says back.

He yawns theatrically, but she doesn’t laugh. Already, she is staring back down at the screen, though she isn’t typing anymore. Logan combs his fingers through his hair and runs his tongue across his front teeth, which feel grimy with sleep. He stands and drapes the blanket over the back of the couch, careful to avoid stepping on the sleeping dog.

He must have removed his socks somehow in the night and now, he can locate only one of them smashed between the couch cushions, inside out and rolled into a ball. He upturns pillows and kneels on the floor, until finally he spots it under Backup’s chin, dark in spots with saliva. He leaves it there.

He walks into the kitchen, bare feet cold on the tile floor, and sits down at the table across from Veronica. The sun comes in though the window, casting his side of the table in a warm glow he can feel on his skin.

The clock on the oven reads 10:36. It is Sunday, which means another week of school, another week with his father home. It means he can’t keep hiding out in Veronica’s little apartment and pretending the rest of the world isn’t waiting outside.

“Feeling better?” he asks Veronica.

“Yeah,” she says without smiling, without looking up.

Veronica starts typing again and he notices she has changed her bandage. However, the skin around it is still discolored and probably will be for days. From beneath the collar of her t-shirt, the long-reaching shadow of another bruise is visible.

Logan drums his knuckles against the surface of the table and she doesn’t even look up at the disruption. Instead, Backup lifts his big head as if in admonishment, the movement rattling the metal tags on his collar. Logan gives the dog an apologetic smile and lays his hands flat on the table. Resting his feet against one of the table legs, he leans backward in his chair, balancing on the back legs, and slowly oscillates back and forth. He watches coffee trickle into the carafe and he watches Veronica wipe breadcrumbs from her lips with the back of her hand.

She does not look up though she is no longer typing. Instead she stares at the screen, her pupils small and dark, her eyes unblinking.

He realizes he is watching her face for some memory of their conversation the night before, some proof to justify the way he feels when he looks at her, as if she is the only person who knows who he really is.

“Veronica,” Logan says, but when she looks up at him, she has that vulnerable look in her eyes and whatever it was he wanted to say is gone.

“Can we just,” she starts to say. But then she stops and just looks down at her hands. Logan looks too, at her pink and dried knuckles, at her uneven nails, at her veins visible in green beneath her skin, tracing their meandering paths through the center of her.

“Can we not talk about it?” she asks in a small voice. “I know I can’t tell you to forget it, but, can we just not talk about it?”

Logan doesn’t say anything. He watches the way her eyes dart past him and her breathing shifts and her hands wring and she looks at the screen again as if to hide behind it. When she looks up again, the look has already gone from her face, replaced by something like indifference. It makes him feel like an amateur, the way she slips into and out of her different selves. He feels like he slipped his confidence off with his shirt the night before. All he has left now is the fear and the weakness that didn’t feel so bad with the night turning everything into shadows. But in the daylight, his secrets are as ugly as his scars.

“Okay,” he says, ignoring the way the back of the kitchen chair presses into the scabs on his back, ignoring the way the table between them has become a chasm, ignoring the way he feels as though he is underwater.

The coffee pot stops and they both look to it as though it were an intruder. But then they stand at the same time and Logan makes his way around the table to help. The floor is dotted with droplets of water or dog drool that squish under his feet.

"Here," Logan says, “Let me.”

"I've got it,” Veronica says and withdraws the coffee pot from the machine.

She fills both mugs to some imaginary line that Logan thinks is too high.

“Can you get the creamer?” Veronica asks.

Logan opens the refrigerator, takes out a bottle of hazelnut coffee creamer and sets it down on the counter. Veronica checks the expiration date before she opens the top, smells it, and pours it into her mug, the coffee going light like hot chocolate. She fills it to the brim and bends forward to sip it without lifting the mug. Logan pours his to a more acceptable level before he picks it up and takes a bitter sip to make more room. It burns his lips and he almost spills in shock. He sets the coffee back on the counter.

It’s too hot to take in more than a sip at a time and too full to move, so they stand together in front of the counter warming the palms of their hands on the ceramic.

Outside, boys in swimming trunks and white undershirts cannonball into the pool. Water shoots up behind them, soaking the plastic lounge chairs. They climb out without the ladder, lifting their bodies out by their scrawny forearms as if this were some sign of masculinity.

Veronica’s elbow brushes against his forearm when she bends for another drink. Hair falls into her face and she hastily tucks it back behind her ears. Logan takes a step closer and he can smell the antiseptic she must have used to clean her wound.

“How was your head?” he asks because he doesn’t know how to say anything else.

“Still gross,” she says and straightens up.  
  
“But at least you didn’t black out.”

“Yeah,” she says. She gives him a small smile.

She curls her hand around the mug and brings it to the table. Logan’s coffee is still too full, so he carries it with both hands, stares at the liquid sloshing from wall to wall with each step he takes. He holds his arms steady and shuffles around the table to his spot.

Logan’s phone rings from somewhere in the living room, cutting through the quiet, and he scrapes his chair against the tile floor just enough so he can squeeze his body out from under the table. He finds the phone on the floor, underneath his novel for English class and his packet of comprehension questions. The caller ID says Little Dick, which still makes him smile, even after all these years of the same dumb joke.

“What’s up man?” Logan says.

“Thank god you picked up. I was worried I’d have to hear one of your stupid quotes,” Dick starts.

“Fuck you too,” he says and Dick laughs in his ear.  
Logan sits down on the couch and reaches down to pet Backup, scrunching the loose skin behind his neck. The dog arcs his head up.

“So last night, you know that Asian chick from Spanish class?” Dick says.

“Which Asian chick?” Logan asks.

He glances over at Veronica. Her hands hover over her keyboard, but he can tell she isn’t typing. She takes a piece of paper out of her folder and sets it down next to her. She yawns.

“You know, the one who came back from summer break with a huge rack?”

“Oh, yeah,” Logan says, calling her to mind. She sits in the row over from him and was once his partner in a skit where she was a waitress and he had to order a three course meal. “Bethany,” he says.

“Yeah, whatever. So Sean shows up to Madison’s last night with this girl, and long story short, we all got to see them by the end of the night. It only took 4 shots of Patrón and a little hot tub action before she took the girls out.”

“That’s great, Dick.”

“Hey what’s with you man? You’re so lame lately. Did you get your period? Put a tampon in and come down to the beach.”

“I’ll be down later,” Logan says.

“Good, ‘cause I don’t want it to just be me and Beav all day. Kid’s weird.”

“I’ll think about it,” Logan says before he flips the phone closed and slides it into his pocket.

The coffee is cool enough to drink now. Veronica takes small sips, while Logan gulps his down to avoid the taste. He wonders if coffee will be something he will one day grow into, like facial hair or button-down shirts. He takes another mouthful and feels it warm in his stomach. Veronica wraps both hands around her mug and leans back in her chair.

“Before you go, can you drop me off at my car?” she asks him.

The coffee is a lump in his throat.

In his effort not to look at her, not to feel anything, he looks around the kitchen. A photo on the refrigerator catches his eye. In it, Veronica and her father give each other bunny ears. Her hair is still long, drowning half her face in blond strands. It’s a completely unflattering picture, but they both have these big, stupid, honest smiles, the kind it's hard to catch yourself making. He wonders if her mother held the camera, if Lilly was still alive, if Veronica has made that face since Lilly died, since—he makes himself think the words—she was raped.

“Yeah,” he says. “Sure.”

He raises the mug to his mouth again.

“Thanks,” she says.

 

 

  
Logan drives Veronica to the parking lot of the Camelot Motel. She turns on his radio and looks out the window. He drives the speed limit and comes to a complete stop each stop sign.

“I’m lucky it wasn’t impounded,” she says, breaking the silence, when Logan pulls up next to her car.

Of course he recognizes the beater from the school parking lot. They used to take turns letting the air out of her tires during passing period or placing upright nails behind her wheels. He sees now that she has the spare tire installed on the front passenger side, the little donut already worn from too much use. The whole car lists forward against it like a limping animal.

He doesn’t even know who did it the last time. For a for while, he’s kept himself separate from the kind of guerilla warfare that Madison likes. He needed an audience, a show. He is a child of actors, after all. But now, he doesn’t know how to call everybody off. He doesn’t even know if they will all listen to him now or if their own grudges and alliances have shifted since a year ago, back when they would huddle together drinking in remembrance of Lilly and plotting revenge. They just needed someone to blame.

“Well, thanks,” she says, as if he is a stranger or an acquaintance, as if this is the end of their dealings with one another.

“It was nothing,” Logan says, keeping with her level of established distance.

“It wasn’t nothing. Let me say thank you and just accept it,” she says.

At the end of the horizon, he can see the water, or maybe it’s the sky. He can hear gulls fighting and he thinks about the beach. Maybe they’ll do something stupid like drink a few beers and go to the coffeeshop on the boardwalk to hit on college girls. If he’s lucky, he might get a number and Dick might get a slap to the face. Or maybe they’ll just get high and watch birds steal food from tourists and wispy clouds laze across the sky.

He feels empty thinking about it.

“Okay,” he says.

She unhooks her seatbelt and Logan unlocks the car doors. She pulls the handle and the door pops open.

“Veronica,” he says, though he isn’t sure what to say. He is afraid that if he doesn’t say the right thing, it will be like none of this ever happened, that they’ll go back to being whatever they were before, something between acquaintances and enemies.

She looks at him expectantly, waiting, her face open as water.

“I’ll see you on Monday,” he says, finally, feeling like it isn’t enough. She nods at him and gets out of the car.

“Wait,” he says, but her door has already clicked shut.

He climbs out of the car and walks around to her side, his hands in his pockets. He stands in front of her.

“Logan,” she says. “It’s okay. I mean, nothing has to change.”

The sun is high in the sky, warm on his neck. A silver Prius, a blue convertible, and a magenta pickup truck are the only cars in the parking lot, aside from his and Veronica's, which he guesses makes sense on a Sunday morning. He doubts many people actually stay the night in the Camelot motel.

Veronica fishes her car keys out of her purse while Logan watches her.

He feels changed. He wants all of this to have changed something. Veronica opens the driver’s side door of her car and throws her purse inside. He catches her before she ducks inside as well, his arm on hers.

“Is that what you want?” he asks.

"Logan," she says and her voice sounds low, like a warning. He lets go and takes a step back.

“Okay,” he says and shoves his hands into his pockets. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

Logan walks back to his car and starts the engine. Veronica’s cup from yesterday sits in his cup holder, wading in shallow water from condensation. It smells chocolate sweet, but underneath the sweetness, there is the sour undertone of spoiled milk. On his way out of the parking lot, he stops at a trash can and throws the cup away.

That’s when he hears her scream. He turns back to see a man pulling her out of the car by her shirt collar, Veronica kicking furiously. He slams her down on the hood of her car wraps his hand around her throat.

Logan accelerates back across the parking lot, pulls alongside them, his car angled toward Veronica’s. He jumps out of the car, leaving the door open and the engine running.

“Where’s the fucking film?” the man is shouting in Veronica’s face as she struggles to fight him off. He either doesn’t notice Logan or doesn’t care. “Where is my wife?”

Logan grabs by man by his shoulder, fingers pressing into the his collarbone, and pulls him off Veronica.

Startled, the man releases her and she slides down the hood of the car. Logan makes a fist and aims for the man’s nose. He misses, his knuckles colliding with the man cheekbone.

Logan loses sight of Veronica as the man’s fist gets him right over the eyebrow. Shit, he thinks, and ducks the next one.

“Move,” Veronica says, her voice raspy, and Logan does.

He hears the electricity ripple through the air around them and their attacker crumbles to the ground. Still, Veronica continues to shock him.

“Call 911,” she tells Logan as she coughs. He pulls his phone out of his pocket, but already a squad car with its lights on swerves into the parking lot and a trio of bystanders move in on them. Logan wipes blood from his nose and breathes heavily.

Deputy Sacks gets out of his vehicle, gun drawn.

“Thanks, Veronica. You make my job so easy,” he says in greeting.

“I do what I can,” Veronica says.

“Are you okay?”

Veronica nods, her hand rising to her throat to cover the finger-shaped marks. Sacks kneels down and handcuffs the man, who doesn’t put up a fight. He puts the man in the back of his cruiser and locks the doors. The bystanders, sensing the action is over, return to their cars and their hotel rooms.

Sacks pulls a notebook and pen out of his back pocket.

“I’m going to need a statement,” he says.

“Sure,” Veronica says, her voice still raspy. “His name’s Peter LeVian. I took some pictures on Friday through the window. His wife is my client and she wanted proof for her divorce lawyer. He saw me and came after me, so I left my car here. I was just coming to get it when he grabbed me.”

“What about that head wound? Not related?”

“He hit me with my camera on Friday night.”

“Okay,” Sacks says as he finishes writing and puts his pad of paper away. “That’s enough to get him into lock-up. We had a complaint from his wife, too.”

"Thanks, Sacks.”

“Are you alright?” he asks Logan.

“Yeah. It’s not broken,” he answers, wiping his nose again.

"I can have an ambulance come,” Sacks says. “Check out your vocal cords?”

“That’s alright,” Veronica says. “I think I just need a glass of water.” She clears her throat again. “My dad should be home by now, anyway.”

“If you’re sure,” Sacks says and gets into his car. He turns out of the parking lot.

Logan watches him go and Veronica leans against her car door.

“Thanks,” she says.

“I thought he was going to kill you,” Logan says.

His voice feels off to him, like his nose has already started to swell. His heart pounds with pent-up adrenaline and fear. He feels it on his skin too, a thin layer of sweat, and in his mouth, coupled with the taste of blood in the back of his throat.

He takes a step closer to Veronica and she looks up at him. He steps closer again and reaches for her. This time, she doesn’t pull away. He holds her against him. She tenses, but after a moment, her muscles slacken and she brings her arms around him too. Both their pulses beat hard against his chest, as though both heartbeats were his own, wild still with terror, or maybe with proximity. He breathes out in a rush, concentrating instead on her warmth, the feel of her fingers splayed on his back, squeezing the cotton of his t-shirt, the places where their arms are touching, sun-warmed and soft. He lets his body calm, but when it does, he still does not let go of her. He is wondering what would have happened if that man had held her two minutes longer, until Sacks pulled in.

“Are you okay?” he asks her, his voice now nasal with the swelling and the blood.

She nods again and her chin is pressed into his ribcage.

"Why was he asking where his wife is?” Logan asks.

Veronica takes a step back and a smirk grows on her face.

“Because I called her on Friday when I was running and told her what happened. I may have suggested she go stay with a friend he doesn’t know.”

The pink finger marks on her skin have somewhat faded. He wonders if she will have bruises there, too, impressions left by a man who wanted to watch her suffocate.

”He was just angry,” she says, in response it seems, to the fear still visible on his face “He wasn’t going to kill me. He just wanted answers. People don’t kill people they need something from,” she explains.

Logan doesn’t point out what seems obvious – that rage is not logical, that crimes of passion, at least his father’s, are most often accidental. It’s like Veronica thinks she is invincible, or maybe doesn’t care that she isn’t.

He exhales and inhales again.

“You need ice,” she says. “People are going to think we got into a fist fight.”

Logan laughs and wipes at his nose again. His thumb comes away wet with his own blood. He rubs it in with his other hand.

The Camelot motel’s neon sign is still on, even during the day, though he can barely tell the difference in the sunlight. Logan reaches up to the bridge of his nose and finds that it feels unfamiliar and tender. He hopes he doesn’t have to go home or to school tomorrow with a swollen face.

“I’ll get you an ice pack,” Veronica says, as though reading his mind. “Just follow me back to my house. I’ll call my dad on the way.”

"Okay,” he says.

His car door is open and his car is still running. He realizes that his legs are shaking with adrenaline that hasn’t quite left him.

He climbs back inside the SUV and follows Veronica’s beater back to the parking lot by her apartment. He feels drugged, as though everything since the Camelot has been happening in slow motion, as though he isn’t even the one driving. Somehow, he manages to stay behind Veronica’s car.

Logan can see Veronica’s dad standing in the doorway of their apartment. When they start to pull in, he is already coming down the steps and approaching Veronica’s car.

Some part of him puts his own car into park and takes the keys out of the ignition. He watches Mr. Mars pull Veronica into a tight hug and kiss the top of her head.

Logan is standing on the pavement a few steps away, wiping his hands on his shirt, squinting into the sun.

When Mr. Mars releases Veronica, he takes a look at Logan and laughs.

“Let’s get you cleaned up,” he says in greeting.

Logan follows Veronica and her father back up the stairs, where the dog is waiting obediently at the door. Veronica bends down and pets him, repeating, “Who’s a good boy?” a few times over as Mr. Mars hands Logan a paper towel roll and ushers him into the bathroom. The bloody towels and Veronica’s clothes have magically disappeared, as did the garbage filled with pink towelettes. He tears a piece of paper towel from the roll and wets it in the sink, expertly dabbing at the dried blood until his face is clean.

“Veronica, could you grab some ice?” Mr. Mars asks and she appears after a moment with an ice pack wrapped in what looks like an old shirt.

“Here,” she says and holds it out to him. Logan takes the ice and presses it against his face. The coldness of it startles him after the warmth of the sink water. Still, he doesn’t remove it.

The three of them return to the living room. Mr. Mars sits next to Veronica on the couch, but Logan remains standing, unsure if he should sit down or thank them for the ice and make his excuses to leave.

“I changed the bandage this morning,” Veronica is telling her father. “You can see it when I change it again tonight.”

The side of her face is still bruised, a mix of purple and magenta and her pale skin, swirling around each other like marble. Logan stands back, holds the ice to his nose, watches the way Veronica’s father’s hands push hair out of her face, as though she is still a small child he needs to care for. Logan can’t help but wonder what that feels like. As long as he can remember, he has been on his own, just living among his parents, like another possession. There are family videos or reels from his dad’s first red carpet where he carried Logan in his arms, making him smile. It’s just, that version of his father seems like a man Logan never got to meet. All he gets are glimpses of him tucked between the father for whom nothing is ever good enough.

“It’s fine dad,” Veronica says and swats his hands away.

She must not have mentioned the other bruises to her father because he doesn’t ask about them. Logan doesn’t say anything. If she wants to keep them secret, that’s her prerogative. Mr. Mars makes Veronica walk a straight line down the hallway, tell him her entire class schedule, and catch a stuffed hotdog that obviously belongs to the dog. Backup runs the length of the apartment excitedly until Veronica drops the toy on the ground. Veronica follows her father’s directions, though Logan can tell she isn’t taking these tests seriously.

"This is why I always tell you to take Backup on stakeouts,” Mr. Mars says in an admonishing voice.

“And I almost always do. I just didn’t on Friday. Look, I learned my lesson,” she says. “And I’ll have a scar to remind me every time I look in the mirror.”

"Be glad it wasn’t worse,” her father says. “You could have been killed.”

He doesn’t say like Lilly but it is on all of their minds. Veronica dead on the asphalt parking lot, a big empty hole in the room, Veronica in a coffin with her arms at her sides, another funeral, another murder trial in Neptune.

“If you don't follow basic safety precautions, Veronica, I can’t in good conscience let you keep working with me.”

Logan interests himself in the painting of a dog hanging on the wall over the couch. He stands at the edge of the hall, at the point where it opens like a mouth, neither completely inside or out of the room. He knows Veronica’s father is not like his. Still, he has a hard time listening to any argument his friends might have with their parents. There is always a fear he can’t shake that it will escalate.

“Dad, it was a mistake. Mistakes happen. Take Backup. Don’t get out of the car. Lesson learned. I survived. It’s going to be fine.” Veronica says all this with a matter-of-fact tone of voice. She looks over to Logan, as if for support. He shrugs, but there's a tightness to his muscles he can’t overcome.

Mr. Mars’s eyes flick briefly in Logan’s direction, as though he had forgotten Logan was in the room at all. He stands. Veronica stays seated and leans further into the couch. Logan takes a step backwards, almost hitting the wall.

"How's your nose?” Mr. Mars asks with a completely different tone of voice that he had reprimanding Veronica. Mr. Mars approaches him so Logan moves the ice so he can see.

“It’s okay,” Logan says, his voice still unfamiliar to him.

“It looks like the swelling is going down,” Mr. Mars says, settling a hand on Logan’s shoulder. “Why don’t you sit down and relax a minute?”

Logan sits next to Veronica on the couch and she points out that he has blood all over his t-shirt.

“I have another one in the car,” he says in that nasally voice that isn’t really his. He stands up and digs the keys out of his pocket.

“I’ll get it,” Mr. Mars says. “Just sit down.” Logan hands his keys to Veronica’s father who disappears out the front door. It is then that Logan realizes he is still shaking. He makes himself breathe in and out and tries to make his body relax.

“Thanks for not telling him,” Veronica says as though she doesn’t notice. It helps, somehow. “I don’t want him to worry more than he does already.”

“It’s your secret, not mine,” Logan says with a shrug. He leans back into the pillows.

“He’s going to go through all your stuff,” Veronica says informatively.

Logan shrugs. “I figured you must have gotten that from him.”

“What?” she says.

“When I came back from Blockbuster, my backpack was zipped. When I left it was wide open.”

Veronica laughs, making herself small among the couch cushions.

“Find anything good?” Logan asks.

“Nothing at all. You’re so boring.”

The door swings back open and Mr. Mars appears, holding the t-shirt Logan had on yesterday.

“Thanks,” Logan says and stands.

He retreats to the bathroom to change his shirt. Before he slides yesterday’s shirt over his head, he stops to check his back in the mirror. The skin has almost healed completely. But, it’ll be a few more days before he’ll stop wearing muscle t’s under his shirts so none of the guys will see when he changes for gym. In the mirror, he can tell the ice has helped to calm the swelling. He touches his nose, molding it to see where the center of the pain is. He traces the bone of it with his finger. Not broken. He holds the ice pack up again.

He changes quickly, feeling strange to be shirtless in the bathroom across from where Veronica and her father are sitting, as if they can see through the door or something.

He opens it and the two of them are sitting there in the living room looking at him. He is holding his bloody t-shirt rolled up in a ball. Backup approaches and sniffs at the shirt. Mr. Mars hands him a plastic grocery bag and smiles.

“What?” he asks.

“Just, thank you. I know I thanked you on the phone, but thanks for helping Veronica. And for today. It means a lot that you have been able to help Veronica, in spite of everything else.” Logan can’t look Mr. Mars in the eyes. It still feels to him as though the words are meant for someone else.

“It was nothing,” Logan says stiffly. He presses the ice pack back to his nose and looks at the pictures of Veronica on the bookshelf.

Mr. Mars turns the TV on and changes the channel to a football game. Logan can tell the Raiders are losing to The Patriots, though the announcers are trying to fool Raiders fans into thinking they still have a chance.

“I’ll make some sandwiches.”

Logan sits down and he and Veronica settle into an uneasy conversation about the English paper she hasn’t finished yet.

“I did mine yesterday,” Logan says. He even emailed it to himself to print out when he gets to class.

Veronica groans. “I barely have an introductory paragraph.”

“Extenuating circumstances, honey,” her father says as her slathers mayonnaise on six pieces of white bread. “I’m sure you can finagle your way into an extension with your doctor’s note.”

He piles cold cuts on top of the mayonnaise, followed by a slice of yellow cheese and a slice of tomato. Logan can’t remember the last time he ate a sandwich on white bread, but figures it was probably at some kind of school picnic. He still remembers the way the bread, soggy with saliva, stuck to the roof of his mouth.

“At least that appointment was good for something,” Veronica says.

After lunch, Logan leaves Veronica with her father and heads to his car. He carries his soiled t-shirt in his hand. He doesn’t expect Veronica to hug him or anything sappy like that, or even walk him out, but he is a little disappointed that all she does is wave to him from the recliner chair and say, “See you tomorrow.” Her father is the one who walks him to the door, thanks him, and locks the door behind him.

He heads to the beach because he doesn’t feel like being alone, or going home, but when he gets to the parking lot, he can’t make himself get out of the car. Hhe doesn’t want to be around any of those people who are his friends without knowing him. Also, his nose is slightly purple and he doesn’t want to explain the weekend to anyone, not yet, and he doesn’t have it in him to make up another injury story. So he heads home, though the gate, down the driveway.

He sits in the car for a long time, feeling different but unable to explain to himself how.

After a while, his mother comes outside wearing slippers and her housecoat. She holds an open pack of cigarettes, half-empty, in her hand. She wordlessly opens the passenger door to Logan’s SUV and climbs inside, pulling it closed behind her. She slides one cigarette out of the pack and presses it between her lips, her lipstick leaving a ring around the white paper. She sets the pack down in her lap and withdraws a silver lighter and an ash tray from the pocket of her housecoat. She cups one hand around her mouth and lights the cigarette. A thin wisp of smoke curls off it and Logan’s mother lowers the window so it can escape through the opening. She sighs.

“How’s Veronica?” she asks.

“Better,” Logan says.

“I’m glad. I always liked her,” his mother says and takes a long drag with her eyes closed. She puffs the smoke out in three circles and Logan opens the window more so it doesn’t make the fabric on the roof of his car sag, so the stale smell of smoke doesn’t linger.

“Can I have one?” he asks.

"You're not eighteen," his mother says, but her voice is tired. She sets the ashtray on Logan’s dashboard and taps her cigarette on its rim.

“I know,” Logan says.

Still, she holds the pack out to him. He withdraws one cigarette and spins it between his fingers theatrically. She smiles and leans forward to light it for him.

“It’s a bad habit. Don’t start,” she says.

“I won’t,” he says.

Logan lowers his window and raises the cigarette to his lips.

"Don't breathe too much or you’ll cough,” she advises.

“I know,” he says.

She watches Logan inhale just a little bit and then open his mouth so the smoke can slip out. He is not practiced enough to make little o’s like his mother sometimes does. Once, he remembers, she managed to make an o that looked like a misshapen heart.

He follows his mother’s gaze to the house where he can see his father’s silhouette in the window of his office. The back of his head.

Logan taps off the excess ash. He watches the ember come to life as he takes another pull and then diminish when he withdraws it from his mouth.

He smokes it until he can’t anymore, until the ember starts to burn his fingers, the tip of the paper wrapping wet with his saliva, the inside of his mouth stale and numb with the taste of it. Logan takes one last drag, inciting little red burns on his thumb and index finger before he crushes the butt in his mother’s ashtray.

Still, he holds that last drag in his mouth a little too long and it makes him cough, the exhaled smoke clouding around him, his fingers stinging, just a little bit, with the burn. Logan’s mother pats him on the back with a warm hand, makes wide open circles that she doesn’t notice make his shirt catch on his scabs, and she tells him over and over again in a soft voice, “Just breathe, honey. Just breathe.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and for all of your beautiful comments. I loved reading them. Thanks also to lilamadison11 on tumblr for posting a rec of this story. I loaded tumblr and was so surprised to see my story at the top of my feed! 
> 
> Sorry about missing my self-imposed Thursday deadline. This last chapter took longer than I thought to revise. Writing is hard.
> 
> //
> 
> I write original fiction, too, though I've been pretty lazy lately. Most is in print journals, but I do have one short short story archived online at the Chicago Reader if you are interested:   
> http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/heather-michaels-pure-fiction-2014/Content?oid=12069621
> 
> Thanks!!


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